Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

“Bound­aries should nev­er split vil­lages or di­vide peo­ple and the way they live.”

That was the em­phat­ic de­c­la­ra­tion from Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Khadi­jah Ameen yes­ter­day as she launched the Cab­i­net-ap­point­ed Bound­aries Re­view Com­mit­tee, a team tasked with cor­rect­ing decades of in­equal­i­ty, con­fu­sion, and com­mu­ni­ty di­vi­sion cre­at­ed by out­dat­ed mu­nic­i­pal lines.

Ameen in­sist­ed that the era of ar­bi­trary bound­ary draw­ing must end.

“One of the things I would like to see is the use of nat­ur­al bound­aries to make it eas­i­er,” she said. “We must give con­sid­er­a­tion to com­mu­ni­ties. Lo­cal gov­ern­ment is about em­pow­er­ing com­mu­ni­ties, and we have to move away from that prac­tice of split­ting them.”

She high­light­ed the long-stand­ing cus­tom of us­ing a sin­gle road­way down the cen­tre of a vil­lage to di­vide dis­tricts, which she said has caused re­al harm over the years.

“If you use a road in the cen­tre of a vil­lage as a bound­ary, one half ends up in one elec­toral dis­trict and the oth­er half in an­oth­er — some­times even in an­oth­er re­gion,” Ameen ex­plained. “It cre­ates con­fu­sion. It di­vides the com­mu­ni­ty spir­it. It is not con­sis­tent with the prin­ci­ple of peo­ple-cen­tred de­vel­op­ment.”

Ac­cord­ing to the min­is­ter, any mod­ern bound­ary re­view must in­stead re­ly on clear, fixed, nat­ur­al mark­ers such as ma­jor wa­ter­cours­es, high­ways, and ge­o­graph­ic fea­tures. “Those bound­aries don’t move. They don’t frac­ture com­mu­ni­ties. They re­spect how peo­ple live.”

Ameen stressed that the is­sues be­fore the com­mit­tee are not new.

The last ma­jor bound­ary re­form came with Act 21 of 1990, when coun­ties were for­mal­ly re­placed by mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tions.

She not­ed that pop­u­la­tion dis­par­i­ties across mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties are now im­pos­si­ble to ig­nore.

“In Port of Spain, one coun­cil­lor rep­re­sents about 3,800 peo­ple. But in Cou­va/Tabaquite/Tal­paro, that num­ber jumps to 13,700,” she said. “And in Tu­na­puna/Pi­ar­co, it’s a stag­ger­ing 14,341. One coun­cil­lor is serv­ing four times the pop­u­la­tion of an­oth­er — for the same salary. That is not fair­ness. That is not eq­ui­ty.”

Ameen al­so high­light­ed the im­bal­ance in ge­o­graph­ic size. “We have mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties ser­vic­ing just 12 square kilo­me­tres,” she said. “Then we have San­gre Grande at 927 square kilo­me­tres. How can the ser­vice de­mands ever line up?”

These dis­par­i­ties, she ex­plained, di­rect­ly af­fect fund­ing al­lo­ca­tions.

“When we cal­cu­late the sub­ven­tion, in one re­gion it works out to $1.50 per per­son for a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice, while in an­oth­er it may be as much as $8 per per­son,” she said. “We can­not have eq­ui­table fund­ing if we do not have eq­ui­table ge­og­ra­phy and eq­ui­table pop­u­la­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion. The math does not lie.”

Ameen em­pha­sised that the bound­ary re­view will be root­ed in trans­par­ent, ev­i­dence-based analy­sis.

“Da­ta is avail­able,” she said. “We are not work­ing by guess. We are not work­ing by pol­i­tics. We are work­ing by facts — pop­u­la­tion da­ta, de­vel­op­ment ob­jec­tives, growth pat­terns, com­mu­ni­ty needs, and the lived re­al­i­ties of peo­ple on the ground.”

She urged the com­mit­tee to con­duct con­sul­ta­tions and pro­duce a re­port strong enough to with­stand pub­lic scruti­ny.

“What­ev­er con­sul­ta­tions you need to have, what­ev­er tech­ni­cal in­for­ma­tion you re­quire, use it,” she told mem­bers. “Your rec­om­men­da­tions will ul­ti­mate­ly guide Cab­i­net, and Par­lia­ment will have the fi­nal au­thor­i­ty.”

Ameen said the re­view must cor­rect past er­rors and pre­pare mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties for the next gen­er­a­tion of de­vel­op­ment needs.

“There are re­gions to­day that must be sep­a­rat­ed — not for po­lit­i­cal rea­sons, but be­cause the de­vel­op­ment fo­cus has changed,” she said. “You may cre­ate a bor­ough where growth is con­cen­trat­ed and leave the rest of the area as a re­gion. The law al­lows it. The his­to­ry guides it. And the da­ta sup­ports it.”

But she in­sist­ed that the heart of the ex­er­cise must re­main com­mu­ni­ty-cen­tred.

“At the end of the day, this is about peo­ple,” Ameen said. “It is about em­pow­er­ing com­mu­ni­ties, lift­ing them up, and en­sur­ing fair­ness. Bound­aries should nev­er break com­mu­ni­ties apart. They should sup­port how com­mu­ni­ties live, work and grow.”

New­ly ap­point­ed Chair­man of the Tech­ni­cal Com­mit­tee to Re­view Mu­nic­i­pal Bound­aries, Stara Ram­lo­gan, echoed the min­is­ter, de­scrib­ing the ex­er­cise as “a na­tion­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of the high­est im­por­tance.”

“Our task is of na­tion­al sig­nif­i­cance as it will in­flu­ence lo­cal gov­er­nance struc­tures, de­vel­op­ment, and eq­ui­table ac­cess to state ser­vices and re­sources,” Ram­lo­gan said.

She stressed that the con­fig­u­ra­tion of bound­aries is far more than a car­to­graph­ic ex­er­cise — it dic­tates how ser­vices are de­liv­ered, how re­sources are al­lo­cat­ed, and how com­mu­ni­ties iden­ti­fy with their lo­cal gov­ern­ment.

“A fair, func­tion­al bound­ary sys­tem is crit­i­cal in achiev­ing bal­anced de­vel­op­ment and ef­fec­tive lo­cal democ­ra­cy,” she said.

The chair­man not­ed that the com­mit­tee is man­dat­ed to iden­ti­fy in­equities and in­ef­fi­cien­cies in the cur­rent frame­work. Its mem­bers bring ex­per­tise in ur­ban plan­ning, law, eco­nom­ics, GIS, gov­er­nance, man­age­ment, and com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment.

“This di­ver­si­ty strength­ens our abil­i­ty to de­liv­er a thor­ough, ob­jec­tive, and ev­i­dence-based re­view,” Ram­lo­gan said, adding that their rec­om­men­da­tions must stand up to pub­lic scruti­ny and align with na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment goals.

She em­pha­sized that the re­view will be ground­ed not on­ly in da­ta but in “the lived re­al­i­ties of our com­mu­ni­ties — from ur­ban cen­tres to rur­al vil­lages.”