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City Hall rushes approval for late 3.1B draft budget …additional garbage disposal fee being considered
Head of the Finance Committee, Oscar Clarke
The Mayor and City Council of Georgetown (M&CC) approved a draft budget of $3.1B for 2018 at a hurriedly called extraordinary meeting on Wednesday, setting off a new round of questions about the handling of the city’s finances.
According to the Municipal and District Councils Act, the budget is due to be submitted to the council by November 15, with copies being made available to the Minister of Communities and the public.
APNN Councillor and head of the (M&CC) Finance Committee, Oscar Clarke told Kaieteur News that the budget process was delayed because of ongoing discussions to implement a separate fee on citizens for garbage disposal. The plan has been opposed by councillors, with more discussions still ongoing.
“The discussions with the various departments were not concluded, and also some discussions with the various communities. There were discussions going since October and those discussions dragged on. Many other things are going on, so we were not able to meet the deadline in November,” Clarke stated.
According to Section 55 of the Municipal and District Councils Act, a notice of 72 hours is required before an extraordinary meeting is called, unless the urgency of the situation dictates that a lesser time is approved by the major or chair of the meeting.
Some councillors were given fewer than 48 hours notice of the meeting along with copies of the draft budget which is equivalent to just over US$15M.
A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) Councillor, Alfred Mentore told Kaieteur News that the legality of the meeting is ‘a tricky one’ which was raised at the Council. He explained that the Council should have used its powers to vary the timeframe for the notice, but instead they went ahead with the draft budget approval.
Councillor Tricia Richards explained that as far as she was concerned, the meeting was legally constituted, since the draft budget approval was an emergency situation. She noted that councillors were part of the budget process.
Clarke noted that the important thing was to get the buy-in of the council before more financial complications occur.
“If we don’t get that approval we can’t spend more than one-twelfth of the budgetary proposal, which would be illegal. We need to get that budget in place so it gives us an opportunity to pay salaries at the end of the month,” Clarke explained.
He further noted that extraordinary meetings are permissible to get the budget through. He stated that all councillors were invited to attend the budget deliberations; hence, it is not a case where the councillors were completely out of the loop.
“When the budget was presented, the number of complaints was very few, even though some of the matters in the budget were substantial,” Clarke noted.
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