Gail Alexan­der

Next month's 2012-2013 bud­get will in­clude a new item of $410 mil­lion for Gov­ern­ment's Con­sti­tu­ten­cy De­vel­op­ment Fund which al­lo­cates $10 mil­lion for each of the 41 con­stituen­cies, Plan­ning Min­is­ter Dr Bhoe Tewarie said yes­ter­day. He said the $10 mil­lion al­lo­ca­tion would be open to all con­stituen­cies-from PP to PNM-to han­dle work that was not be­ing done by Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment bod­ies. He said the plan had been dis­cussed by three pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tions, in­clud­ing the PNM and UNC gov­ern­ments. "It has been de­lib­er­at­ed by them but was nev­er brought to Cab­i­net so it's not new. What's new is that we are do­ing it," he added at yes­ter­day's week­ly Gov­ern­ment me­dia brief­ing. Tewarie ex­plained a team es­tab­lished by Cab­i­net had ex­am­ined the idea of a con­stituen­cy fund to im­prove ser­vice de­liv­ery, es­pe­cial­ly at mu­nic­i­pal lev­el, to in­crease ef­fec­tive­ness of con­stituen­cy rep­re­sen­ta­tion and sup­port and en­hance Gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives in the com­mu­ni­ty in the con­text of lo­cal gov­ern­ment sys­tems.

Team in­put was giv­en by the Fi­nance Min­istry, Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, For­eign Af­fairs/Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Plan­ning sec­tors. He said ac­count­abil­i­ty and trans­paren­cy were big fea­tures of Gov­ern­ment's con­cept for the fund. The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al would present leg­is­la­tion to Par­lia­ment which would gov­ern ex­e­cu­tion and ad­min­is­tra­tion of the fund, Tewarie said. He said the Plan­ning Min­istry would do a bi-an­nu­al eval­u­a­tion of the fund con­cept and re­port to Cab­i­net on it every two years. Tewarie said if the leg­is­la­tion was not ready by Sep­tem­ber-when the Bud­get was pre­sent­ed-it should be ready by Oc­to­ber or there­abouts. He said MPs for each of the 41 seats would sign-off for projects for the fund but the Fi­nance Min­istry's per­ma­nent sec­re­tary would sign to al­low al­lo­ca­tions.