An­na-Lisa Paul

The Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment is be­ing shelved as the Gov­ern­ment moves to im­ple­ment a mod­ern man­age­ment sys­tem which is styled af­ter the one cur­rent­ly be­ing used by the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA).

Ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Franklin Khan, this move will em­pow­er the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions with greater au­ton­o­my to make de­ci­sions, while they will now be re­quired to re­port to the Min­istry of Fi­nance on fis­cal mat­ters on­ly.

Speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence at Kent House, Mar­aval, yes­ter­day, Khan said the move was in keep­ing with promis­es made by the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) on the cam­paign trail.Khan joked that he had been dubbed the "Trans­for­ma­tion Min­is­ter" as he had been hand­ed both min­is­te­r­i­al port­fo­lios and chal­lenged to suc­cess­ful­ly over­see the smooth tran­si­tion of the move by lo­cal gov­ern­ment.

Speak­ing to re­porters pri­or to meet­ing with the tech­ni­cal team ap­point­ed by Cab­i­net, Khan said they were cur­rent­ly in the process of for­mu­lat­ing the poli­cies and plans for the rur­al de­vel­op­ment com­po­nent.

Promis­ing that they would soon be head­ing to Cab­i­net with the nec­es­sary changes, Khan said, "We promised lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­form in the mod­el of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, and we al­so promise that would be im­ple­ment­ed and fi­nalised on or be­fore the next lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tion which is due at the end of 2016."

Khan has al­so giv­en the as­sur­ance that the process would not ad­verse­ly af­fect the lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tion which is con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly due next year.Adding that they were op­er­at­ing with­in strin­gent time­lines, Khan said Cab­i­net had ap­point­ed two com­mit­tees to over­see the ex­er­cise.

The min­is­te­r­i­al com­mit­tee, which is chaired by Khan, has been tasked with pro­vid­ing over­sight on the lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­form process, en­sur­ing a smooth tran­si­tion, fa­cil­i­tat­ing the high­est lev­el of col­lab­o­ra­tion among key gov­ern­ment min­istries and di­rect­ing the tech­ni­cal com­mit­tee to en­sure they ad­here to es­tab­lished gov­ern­ment poli­cies.

Khan said the Gov­ern­ment was in the process of se­cur­ing the ser­vices of ex­perts from Ja­maica and the Unit­ed King­dom to as­sist with the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the new sys­tem lo­cal­ly. He said both of those coun­tries had suc­cess­ful­ly in­tro­duced sim­i­lar mod­els.

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The min­is­te­r­i­al com­mit­tee in­cludes deputy chair­man Stu­art Young, Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and Le­gal Af­fairs; Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell; Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Camille Robin­son-Reg­is; and So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Af­fairs Min­is­ter Cheryl-Ann Crichlow-Cock­burn.

The tech­ni­cal com­mit­tee, chaired by Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment and Rur­al De­vel­op­ment Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary An­gela Ed­wards, in­cludes deputy chair­man al­der­man An­tho­ny Roberts; al­der­man Ter­ry Ron­don; Point Fortin May­or Clyde Paul; at­tor­ney Lennox Sankers­ingh; and a host of pub­lic ser­vice tech­nocrats.