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City Hall to unveil lowest budget in 12 years today
The cash-strapped Georgetown municipality will today unveil its $1.9billion budget to run the capital city
Junior Garrett, Chairman of the Finance Committee
this year – an amount way short of that which is required to balance its books, look after the city and pay workers.
Chairman of the Finance Committee, Junior Garrett, will be presenting City Hall’s lowest budget in 12 years to the Mayor and City Council.
In fact, Garrett who had begun presenting the budget, stressing that City Hall must be run like the business it is, was yesterday interrupted owing to a lack of quorum.
Even though, councillors were cautioned by Yonette Pluck, the Town Clerk, that if anyone leaves the meeting would have ended, Councillor Shirley Sheppard walked out.
As such, Councillors decided to convene another meeting today at 10:00 am, where Garrett would read the budget so that City Hall could get on with its business.
However, even before Garrett had begun reading of the budget, Councillors engaged in lengthy discussions whether the budget should have been presented yesterday or Wednesday. That was based on the fact that Garrett wanted to ensure that all outstanding liabilities, if any, be included in the budget.
Pluck took the position that the Administration is unaware of outstanding liabilities while some Councillors including Gladstone George stressed that the budget was delayed for three months and should be presented.
However, Pluck indicated that the Council could not afford to allow this period for all liabilities to be recorded. Consequently, seven Councillors including Garrett, who had put forward the proposal to have the budget read on Wednesday, voted for the reading of the budget yesterday. Meanwhile, one voted against the reading and another abstained.
According to Garrett, this year’s budget is the lowest in 12 years and caters for increases in commercial and residential rates and taxes. Even though, rates and taxes are supposed to be increased every five years, for the past 11 years there have been no increases.
He added that if the increase in rates and taxes is to be avoided, the compensatory measure of seeking Government’s assistance is absolutely necessary. It was noted that $18M is expected to be spent on designing computer software for the collection of rates and taxes.
Garrett related that the sum of $123,980,000 was budgeted for garbage collection, which is a major role of the Mayor and City Council. This is $61M more than last year. Meanwhile, drainage works for 2012 is budgeted for $130M, which is $10M less than last year.
The human resource of the City Constabulary is expected to increase, and as such $31M has been earmarked for this department. Meanwhile, the sum of $103,220,000 will be spent on repairs to the City markets and the abattoir.
He emphasized that $47M would be expended on the purchase of vehicles for all seven departments of the council, with $15M being expended in both the Solid Waste and Engineering Departments.
Garrett asserted that the budget would be monitored on a quarterly basis from January to March by April 15 and then monthly. A monthly budgeted cash flow statement will be prepared and this would be analyzed with the actual amounts spent and any adverse variance would be investigated immediately and necessary corrective action taken.
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