Yvonne Ba­boolal

The Gov­ern­ment is on a wild spend­ing spree and, like Oliv­er Twist, keeps com­ing back for more, Laven­tille East/Mor­vant MP Don­na Cox is charg­ing. Cox, mak­ing her con­tri­bu­tion to the bud­get de­bate in the House yes­ter­day, said each bud­get was get­ting larg­er and larg­er and the Gov­ern­ment kept com­ing back for more dur­ing the fis­cal year.

In three years, the Gov­ern­ment spent $170 bil­lion, more than what the PNM spent in six years, she added. Crit­i­cis­ing Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai, Cox said one would have thought an out­stand­ing banker like him would have brought some so­bri­ety to the mad­ness.

Cit­ing some ex­am­ples of bad spend­ing, she said $20 mil­lion was al­lo­cat­ed for an eight-week pro­gramme at the Ma­yaro In­door Fa­cil­i­ty but re­ports stat­ed stu­dents were bring­ing al­co­hol on the premis­es, us­ing ob­scene lan­guage and parad­ing bare­backed on the com­pound.

Fur­ther, they mu­ti­lat­ed a fire alarm sys­tem and de­faced por­traits of the Pres­i­dent, the Prime Min­is­ter and the Min­is­ter of Sports with soft drinks. They al­so were drink­ing wa­ter from a con­demned wa­ter cool­er be­cause there was no drink­ing wa­ter at the fa­cil­i­ty, she said.

Cox al­so told the House about con­tracts be­ing award­ed to two com­pa­nies in D'Abadie/O'Meara by the Min­istry of Sports and claimed that was a com­mon prac­tice in the min­istry. She said she al­so read a text mes­sage sent by a min­is­ter to a com­mu­ni­ty ac­tivist promis­ing a con­tract to clean build­ings and ask­ing for the name of the ac­tivist's com­pa­ny.

List­ing a litany of woes in Laven­tille East/Mor­vant, Cox fur­ther charged that the Gov­ern­ment had ne­glect­ed and aban­doned her con­stituen­cy. On the is­sue of crime, she said the Re­mand Prison at Gold­en Grove, built to hold 300 pris­on­ers, had 1,200 in­mates.

There is a pro­lif­er­a­tion of cell­phones in the pris­ons and it was no se­cret that pris­on­ers "called shots" on peo­ple from their cell­phones, the MP said. Cox al­so crit­i­cised the "lock­down" of Bev­er­ly Hills in?Laven­tille by the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry, say­ing it was like a painkiller which took the hurt away while the prob­lem still lurked be­neath.