The move by Cus­toms of­fi­cers in­to the Rich­mond Street Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus Plaza marks the end of that build­ing's sta­tus as an ar­chi­tec­tur­al ghost town.As far back as 2007, for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning had in­formed the na­tion that among the sky­line build­ing projects his ad­min­is­tra­tion had un­der­tak­en at the Port-of-Spain wa­ter­front was the Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus Plaza, which was meant to re­duce the an­nu­al $221 mil­lion rental bill for state agen­cies.

For the gov­ern­ment, it was win/win/win. They got cus­toms to oc­cu­py an un­used as­set, they saved on costs, and Cus­toms got nicer, more mod­ern work­space. The ques­tion is why it's tak­en this long to oc­cu­py per­fect­ly util­i­tar­i­an and mod­ern gov­ern­ment build­ings that hap­pen to be owned by the peo­ple of T&T. It is one of the great ironies of state hous­ing that the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion does not own its own build­ing and rents its head of­fice at South Quay at a month­ly cost of more than $500,000.

The gov­ern­ment is a large em­ploy­er, and like any oth­er renter, it should pay the mar­ket rate. Be­ing a large em­ploy­er means it has a large rental bill. How­ev­er if it is to spend tax­pay­ers' mon­ey wise­ly, it must run it­self like a busi­ness, and that means look­ing for ef­fi­cien­cies in its costs and over­heads. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true of rentals, since, as cam­pus Plaza proves, it did and does have al­ter­na­tives.

In Ju­ly 2010, the in­com­ing gov­ern­ment not­ed that it had in­her­it­ed four prop­er­ty rentals signed just be­fore and af­ter the gen­er­al elec­tion for a con­tract­ed pe­ri­od of five years at a to­tal cost of $55 mil­lion. Four years lat­er, the Gov­ern­ment ac­knowl­edged spend­ing $24 mil­lion on rent for an emp­ty build­ing at One Alexan­dra Place and the Cab­i­net seems to have no im­me­di­ate plants to out­fit it for oc­cu­pa­tion or to ful­fil pri­or plans to move the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment there.

The Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus Plaza was de­signed to house two gov­ern­ment min­istries, the Min­istry of Le­gal Af­fairs and the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and two ma­jor state ser­vices, the Board of In­land Rev­enue and the Cus­toms and Ex­cise head­quar­ters. Cus­toms of­fi­cers are clear­ly pleased at the im­prove­ment in their work­space, and it's to be hoped that more of these build­ings are used, low­er­ing the cost of gov­ern­ment. Suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments have paid sig­nif­i­cant rental bills when they had ready made al­ter­na­tives avail­able.

With regime change there's some­times the temp­ta­tion to not at­tach the same im­por­tance to projects and com­mit­ments of the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment. There is no sug­ges­tion that that is what has hap­pened–in­deed the gov­ern­ment can point out that dri­ving some moves to com­ple­tion is proof that it did not view the cam­pus through par­ti­san lens­es. But the larg­er point re­mains.

While such con­sid­er­a­tions are to be ex­pect­ed in the cut and thrust of pol­i­tics, politi­cians should re­sist the temp­ta­tion to see projects as be­long­ing to the oth­er side, and con­sid­er the con­se­quences of their de­ci­sions–or non de­ci­sions–on the tax­pay­er dol­lars un­der their stew­ard­ship.

The mar­ket­place wants to ex­tract the best pos­si­ble val­ue from its as­sets, in­clud­ing build­ings for rent, from all po­ten­tial clients, in­clud­ing the gov­ern­ment. From the state's point of view, its best in­ter­ests, fis­cal­ly, are served by cut­ting its rent bill, among oth­ers.It makes fi­nan­cial sense that where the gov­ern­ment owns its own build­ings or land, it would up­grade both to re­duce the costs of its op­er­a­tions.

Af­ter all, busi­ness every­where fre­quent­ly calls on gov­ern­ments to op­er­ate lean­er. It can hard­ly be up­set when a gov­ern­ment does that–it may in­deed ap­plaud the ap­pli­ca­tion of fis­cal com­mon sense and ef­fi­cien­cy.