Nadaleen Singh

There are no im­me­di­ate plans to in­crease the rates for wa­ter and lights for res­i­den­tial, com­mer­cial or in­dus­tri­al cus­tomers.So says chair­man of the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion Dr Anne-Marie Mo­hammed.She was speak­ing yes­ter­day at a cer­e­mo­ny at the Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties, Eliz­a­beth Street, St Clair, where six peo­ple re­ceived their in­stru­ments of ap­point­ment to serve on the board of the com­mis­sion for two years. Mo­hammed said she had one more year to serve. The chair­man said the com­mis­sion was await­ing fig­ures from both WASA and T&TEC be­fore mak­ing any de­ter­mi­na­tion on a rate in­crease. The process was de­layed as the com­mis­sion did not have a func­tion­ing board be­tween 2010/2011.She said dur­ing that pe­ri­od a "draft de­ter­mi­na­tion" of WASA and T&TEC's ap­pli­ca­tion for rate in­creas­es was re­viewed and the com­mis­sion now had to "align, eco­nom­i­cal­ly, the new rates/up­com­ing rates."

Ac­cord­ing to the com­mis­sion's Web site, be­tween April and June, some $317,362 was award­ed to cus­tomers in re­bates or com­pen­sa­tion.Ap­point­ments were al­so made to the T&T Postal Cor­po­ra­tion (TTPost) board. Its deputy chair­man Har­ry Bis­ram said it has not achieved its goal to be in­de­pen­dent of cen­tral gov­ern­ment.Fi­nan­cial­ly, he said, the cor­po­ra­tion has been fac­ing com­pe­ti­tion from the on­line mar­ket but a busi­ness plan has been cre­at­ed to pos­si­bly look at turn­ing around TTPost's fi­nan­cials."Giv­en the struc­ture we met at TTPost when were ap­point­ed in 2011, TTPost is 'still heav­i­ly de­pen­dent on the trea­sury.' A large part of that de­pen­den­cy is due to the Uni­ver­sal Postal oblig­a­tion–I would guess that is about 60 per cent of TTPost op­er­a­tions."

"TTPost is fac­ing a lot of com­pe­ti­tion from the IT sec­tor. A lot of peo­ple are not us­ing mails any more, you can buy on­line," he ex­plained. "The busi­ness has been af­fect­ed–there are chal­lenges.

"I would say that we have stemmed the tide over the last two years."