Wat­son Duke, Mi­nor­i­ty Leader of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, is tak­ing Pres­i­dent of the Pe­nal/Debe Cham­ber of Com­merce Ram­per­sad Sieu­raj to task over state­ments on the use of To­ba­go's bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion.

On Mon­day, at a press con­fer­ence in Cou­va, Sieu­raj re­port­ed­ly sug­gest­ed that the cor­po­ra­tion and THA ex­change their an­nu­al bud­getary al­lo­ca­tions for two years so the cor­po­ra­tion's flood­ing is­sue can be fixed.

To­ba­go gets just over $2 bil­lion in al­lo­ca­tions an­nu­al­ly, while the cor­po­ra­tion gets less than $100 mil­lion.

Duke, who is al­so the leader of the Pro­gres­sive De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Pa­tri­ots (PDP), called Sieu­raj's sug­ges­tion, "a sick joke".

In a What­sApp voice mes­sage, Duke said Sieu­raj's state­ments are "in­sen­si­tive... provoca­tive and meant to in­cense To­bag­o­ni­ans... (and can) fur­ther dam­age the strained (fi­nan­cial) re­la­tion­ship that ex­ists be­tween To­ba­go and Trinidad."

Duke, who al­so holds the ti­tles of pres­i­dent of the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion and Na­tion­al Trade Union Cen­ter, not­ed that To­ba­go's an­nu­al al­lo­ca­tion from Trinidad is "a mea­ger ex­pec­ta­tion" of what is re­quired to run an "un­de­vel­oped To­ba­go."

"That mon­ey is life for us. It's every sin­gle thing. It's med­ica­tion. It's gas," Duke said.

Last week, tor­ren­tial show­ers re­sult­ed in floods in ar­eas in the Pe­nal / Debe Cor­po­ra­tion, and many per­sons have lost their be­long­ings.

To ad­dress the prob­lem im­me­di­ate­ly, the Gov­ern­ment has pledged $2 mil­lion in re­lief to af­fect­ed res­i­dents.