The city council is at an impasse over its proposed 2014 budget, which was rejected by a majority of councillors during a vote last Thursday.
As a result, the proposed 2014 budget of $2,055,467,116 for the Georgetown district was not presented to the Local Government Ministry in keeping with a November 15 deadline.
On Friday, Chairman and Overseer of the council’s Finance Committee Junior Garrett informed Junior Local Government Minister Norman Whittaker that the budget had not been passed. He also said that a majority of Georgetown’s councillors, along with Mayor Hamilton Green, are not confident that it realistically reflects the municipality’s needs for the coming year. Whittaker subsequently said that steps will be taken to address the situation.
On Thursday, when Garrett presented the budget to the city council, 11 councillors voted against it, 4 voted for it and 2 abstained from voting.
In an invited comment, Georgetown Mayor Hamilton Green noted that the council has asked Garrett to correct flaws in the budget.
According to Green, there were several features in the document that were “strange” and did not cater for liabilities. “A budget has to have a philosophical content… That budget had a number of words which were flawed and hypocritical. Mr Garrett, like the acting Town Clerk, believes [he is] clothed with imperial and divine rights. He cannot act outside of a decision made in a democratic institution on a particular matter. The matter was fully ventilated at the Statutory Meeting and by a democratic decision it was rejected. As a compromise, the Deputy Mayor [Patricia Chase-Green] tried to prevail upon the Chairman to go back to the drawing board and take account of the comments and concerns expressed and come up with a document that is credible and therefore acceptable,” he said.
According to Green, there were several discrepancies in the budget Garrett presented to them. “Neither the acting Town Clerk nor the Chairman availed themselves of doing exactly what was in the write up; that is, when he was finished speaking I required him to read the prelude to the budget, because that is vital to any budget. If you put in your budget five cents to buy a phone, then the prelude must say why you want to buy a phone… in the budget prelude a lot of nice words were made, [but they were] not reflected in the budget and that is our concern. They talked about doing things but the budget did not reflect the financial resources to do those things,” he explained.
As a result, Green charged that Garrett, with the “flawed” budget, has handed election ammunition to the PPP. “They say that they are going to fix the cemetery, instead of saying that they would like to fix it, but they lack the resources,” he said.
Garrett on Friday said that Green wanted a call for the rates and appeal panels to be included as part of proposed expenditure in the budget. However, he noted that the panel has not been in operation in over 20 years. “…It is strange that at this point in time in the 2014 budget that you will want the cost go in,” he said. “There is nothing relevant to the budget as it relates to the rates and appeals panel. It was defunct for over 20 years and so we could not put in any financial expenditure for that.”
Garrett said also that there was a request for figures to be put in for next year’s planned local government elections. “Now we don’t know if next year elections are going to come off…We don’t know what so we could not have put that,” he explained.
Chase-Green stated that the proposed budget cannot sustain the city. “$2 billion can’t even run this city. Right now we are at a standstill in garbage collection. The ministries’ combined forces [are] expected to start a clean-up campaign in Georgetown soon and what they have to understand is that all the money that they are pouring into Georgetown is money that we ought to be spending on Georgetown,” she said.
She added that there was no accounting in the budget for additional revenue from the high-rise buildings that are continuing to go up around the city and the evaluation of those buildings for an increase in their rates and taxes. “They will still be paying the same old rate. We didn’t look at a lot of things in the plan,” she said, while also noting that it is a fact that next year is an elections year.
Like Green, she was critical of Garrett’s attempt to present the budget to the minister on Friday. “He was told in no uncertain terms that if he presents the budget to the minister this morning [Friday], it would be his own personal budget and not that of the council. If the minister had only accepted that budget, that would have been the worst blow dealt to this council. The assets of this council [are] not in this budget. He took his own personal budget to the minister,” she said.
“We asked him to do an adjustment to the budget, to put in the assets in the budget, to put in some of the things that he did not put in and that he agreed should be put in, but he was pig headed…” she charged. “I want to know what side he really on,” she added.
Speaking on the issue of an increase in salaries for councillors, Chase-Green said, “I am the councillor who said that we should be given a salary according to Section 22 of [the Municipal and District Councils Act] 28:01, which says that remuneration can be paid to councillors subject to the approval of the minister,” she noted.
According to Councillor Ranwell Jordan, Garrett “should have asked for time. He could have asked the minister for another day or two, adjust the budget and take back a better budget. He was out of order. I told him that he is a servant of the council and he said ‘no,’ that he is a servant of the people and I had to explain to him and cause him to admit that he is a servant of the council.”
