Ameen’s project plans stall without property tax funds

Last Tues­day, se­nior of­fi­cials from mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tions—both Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress and Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment-con­trolled—were sum­moned to a meet­ing with Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Khadi­jah Ameen, where she at­tempt­ed to de­vise a strat­e­gy to get in­tend­ed projects off the ground.

In this closed-door meet­ing, and amid the re­cent fir­ing of thou­sands of Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) and Forestry work­ers, Min­is­ter Ameen re­port­ed­ly urged may­ors and chair­men, CEOs, trea­sur­ers, fi­nan­cial of­fi­cers and en­gi­neers to move swift­ly on short-term em­ploy­ment projects to, as she put it, “help the peo­ple on the ground.”

Mul­ti­ple sources from the cor­po­ra­tions con­firmed the de­tails of that meet­ing to Guardian Me­dia.

Guardian Me­dia has learnt that the mech­a­nism of­fered to ex­e­cute these projects is a line item in the na­tion­al bud­get—Vote 02/001/48, of­fi­cial­ly ti­tled Spe­cial Pro­grammes in Cities, Bor­oughs and Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to the of­fi­cial bud­get de­scrip­tion, that vote is not in­tend­ed for hir­ing staff. It ex­plic­it­ly ex­cludes per­son­nel-re­lat­ed costs and mi­nor equip­ment pur­chas­es. It’s meant for non-staff-re­lat­ed ex­pens­es tied to spe­cial pro­grammes.

Vote 02/001/48 cur­rent­ly has no funds. And it won’t re­ceive mon­ey any time soon be­cause the rev­enue it was tied to, the prop­er­ty tax, has been scrapped. The $135 mil­lion in prop­er­ty tax al­ready col­lect­ed from cit­i­zens is now sit­ting in the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund, out of reach of the cor­po­ra­tions it was meant to sup­port.

The prop­er­ty tax was in­tend­ed to be col­lect­ed through the Trinidad and To­ba­go Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty (TTRA) as part of a broad­er tax col­lec­tion sys­tem. How­ev­er, with the TTRA now re­pealed, the fund­ing mech­a­nism is gone. The TTRA was re­pealed be­fore any of the rev­enue it had col­lect­ed could be rout­ed back to the vote it was orig­i­nal­ly tied to, leav­ing re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions with no ac­cess to the mil­lions col­lect­ed.

As a re­sult, re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions are fac­ing short­falls in their goods and ser­vices bud­gets, with the ex­tent of the short­fall vary­ing from one cor­po­ra­tion to an­oth­er.

A UNC of­fi­cial who was privy to the meet­ing but asked to re­main anony­mous ex­plained that in the­o­ry, had prop­er­ty tax and the TTRA re­mained op­er­a­tional a bit longer, it might have been pos­si­ble to move from col­lec­tion to dis­burse­ment, which would have al­lowed cor­po­ra­tions to ac­cess the fund­ing tied to Vote 02/001/48.

De­spite this, lo­cal gov­ern­ment bod­ies were then en­cour­aged to con­sid­er us­ing an­oth­er al­lo­ca­tion. How­ev­er, even if they want­ed to, the process isn’t sim­ple. Redi­rect­ing funds from one vote to an­oth­er, which is called a vire­ment, re­quires mul­ti­ple lev­els of ap­proval: from the cor­po­ra­tion’s coun­cil, the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, and even­tu­al­ly the Min­istry of Fi­nance. How­ev­er, that process could be lengthy and will de­feat the pur­pose of the short-term em­ploy­ment boost the min­is­ter hopes to achieve.

Con­tact­ed on the is­sue, Port-of-Spain May­or Chin­ua Al­leyne said his cor­po­ra­tion had al­ready tried to re­pur­pose the funds but was de­nied.

“I raised the ques­tion of the trans­fer of our al­lo­ca­tion from the line item that was to be fund­ed by prop­er­ty tax to oth­er ar­eas such as ‘Uni­forms or Ma­te­ri­als and Sup­plies’, as the process to col­lect prop­er­ty tax has been scrapped by the Gov­ern­ment. These funds rep­re­sent 15 per cent of our al­lo­ca­tion for goods and ser­vices, so it is quite sig­nif­i­cant. We had ap­plied to trans­fer the al­lo­ca­tion dur­ing the Mid-Year Re­view, but it was not ap­proved,” Al­leyne ex­plained.

“We will ap­ply for the trans­fer again, and based on the min­is­ter’s as­sur­ances dur­ing the meet­ing, we are hope­ful that the ap­proval will be grant­ed so that we can con­tin­ue to ex­pand our ser­vices through the end of the fi­nan­cial year.”

Ch­agua­nas May­or Faaiq Mo­hammed, mean­while, de­fend­ed the min­is­ter’s ap­proach, de­scrib­ing Ameen as sim­ply “think­ing out loud” while at­tempt­ing to gen­er­ate ideas to stim­u­late short-term em­ploy­ment.

“So, what she did, she asked cor­po­ra­tions as well to give her ideas, like projects, pro­grammes or ini­tia­tives, to email her pro­grammes and ini­tia­tives,” Mo­hammed said.

“So, I am think­ing, like, I know we have a big pot­hole cri­sis in the coun­try, so Ch­agua­nas, I would be look­ing to do a mas­sive pot­hole erad­i­ca­tion.”

That project, he said, would re­quire ma­te­r­i­al, ma­chin­ery and, of course, labour.

Mo­hammed al­so ques­tioned the de­lay in dis­trib­ut­ing the prop­er­ty tax funds. He con­firmed that Vote 02/001/48 was orig­i­nal­ly tied to prop­er­ty tax col­lec­tions and said the mon­ey was sup­posed to be dis­trib­uted to cor­po­ra­tions, but nev­er was.

“Look how many months have gone, and it was nev­er dis­trib­uted …,” he said.

An­oth­er hur­dle to the re­quest for job cre­ation is a memo from the Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary in the Rur­al De­vel­op­ment Min­istry to cor­po­ra­tion CEOs, which speaks to a “hir­ing freeze.”

The memo, dat­ed May 16, from act­ing Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Pe­ter Mitchell states, “The Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment has ad­vised that the ref­er­ence at the post-Cab­i­net press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day on the halt­ing of is­su­ing new con­tracts is in ref­er­ence to per­son­nel em­ploy­ment.”

At that post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said, “I have frozen all gov­ern­ment hir­ing and is­su­ing of gov­ern­ment con­tracts just for a time un­til we get the new boards in­stalled, and we look at what has hap­pened and the best way for­ward.”

The memo from PS Mitchell, how­ev­er, in­structs CEOs to “pro­ceed with the im­ple­men­ta­tion of your re­spec­tive projects un­der the De­vel­op­ment Pro­gramme.”

It of­fers no ad­di­tion­al clar­i­ty on whether new short-term jobs like those be­ing dis­cussed at last week’s meet­ing would vi­o­late the hir­ing pause.

On the hir­ing re­stric­tions, May­or Mo­hammed said, “No, no, no, I think that hir­ing freeze ap­plies to the mid­dle man­age­ment lev­el, month­ly paid work­ers.”

He added, “You can still have room for dai­ly, for dai­ly paid, short-term, that kind of stuff. But no more man­agers and full-time staff, ba­si­cal­ly. Not at this time.”

Mo­hammed sug­gest­ed the push may be “time sen­si­tive.”

“You need to fin­ish it be­fore the fi­nan­cial year,” he said, in­di­cat­ing that part of the ur­gency stems from the fact that any mon­ey not spent on short-term pro­grammes be­fore Sep­tem­ber 30 would lapse.

At a post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing on May 23, the Prime Min­is­ter called on the for­mer PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion to ac­count for the $135.6 mil­lion in prop­er­ty tax­es col­lect­ed be­tween Feb­ru­ary 2024 and May 2025.

How­ev­er, for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert dis­missed any sug­ges­tion of wrong­do­ing, ex­plain­ing the funds were placed in­to the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Fund as re­quired by law.

He said lo­cal gov­ern­ment cor­po­ra­tions were not yet equipped to col­lect the tax di­rect­ly, and the law al­lowed the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance to au­tho­rise them on­ly when they had prop­er in­fra­struc­ture in place, such as vaults, au­dit teams, and cashier units.

Ac­cord­ing to the 2025 Draft Es­ti­mates of Rev­enue and Ex­pen­di­ture, pro­ject­ed rev­enue from prop­er­ty tax was $517 mil­lion.

Min­is­ter Ameen did not re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment from Guardian Me­dia.

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