Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

gail.alexan­der@guardian.co.tt

There are three oth­er PNM nom­i­nees vy­ing to con­test the Mara­bel­la South/Vista­bel­la seat which for­mer UNC coun­cil­lor Mar­cus Gird­harie—now with the PNM—al­so wants to con­test for the PNM.

This was con­firmed by PNM ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cials on Sun­day ahead of Mon­day’s PNM screen­ing of nom­i­nees for the San Fer­nan­do cor­po­ra­tion for the Au­gust 14 Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tions. There are 141 elec­toral ar­eas up for con­test.

The PNM’s screen­ing on Mon­day will be done from 4 pm at the PNM of­fice, on Cof­fee Street, San Fer­nan­do.

Al­so to be screened are nom­i­nees for the Siparia cor­po­ra­tion, where the PNM is al­so tar­get­ing two more seats. The PNM cur­rent­ly holds three elec­toral ar­eas in Siparia’s cor­po­ra­tion and UNC, six

On Tues­day, the PNM will screen nom­i­nees for Princes Town and Rio Claro/Ma­yaro and on Wednes­day, for Ch­agua­nas and Cou­va.

The San Fer­nan­do cor­po­ra­tion is a bat­tle­ground seat which could break the cur­rent 7/7 tie which the PNM and UNC ob­tained in the 2019 Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment polls.

Then, the PNM lost ground in the San Fer­nan­do area and UNC had three seats, al­so los­ing the Co­coyea/Tarou­ba seat by 30 votes.

Gird­harie was one of the three UNC mem­bers who won elec­toral ar­eas in the 2019 Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment polls.

He was at the UNC’s May 22 San Fer­nan­do cam­paign launch lob­by­ing for the UNC against PNM, but now says that meet­ing so­lid­i­fied his de­ci­sion to leave the UNC, which he claimed has no plan to win the cor­po­ra­tion.

He sub­se­quent­ly re­signed and filed a nom­i­na­tion with the PNM to con­test Mara­bel­la South/Vista­bel­la.

PNM of­fi­cials said there were about 30 nom­i­nees for the nine San Fer­nan­do seats and seek­ing to con­test Mara­bel­la South/Vista­bel­la were two men and a woman as well as Gird­harie, they added.

UNC to com­plete San­do, Grande and four oth­ers

The UNC, which has com­plet­ed screen­ing of nom­i­nees for eight cor­po­ra­tions, has six more to com­plete, in­clud­ing the San Fer­nan­do and San­gre Grande bat­tle­grounds.

UNC deputy leader, Jear­lean John, con­firmed the UNC screened for Point Fortin and Ari­ma last Fri­day.

Four peo­ple were screened for Ari­ma Cen­tral. The seat is now held by for­mer UNC coun­cil­lor Shel­don “Fish” Gar­cia who re­signed from the UNC in May, re­turned to the PNM and re­cent­ly ob­tained the nod from the PNM’s screen­ing team to con­test the seat for PNM .

The UNC was to have screened nom­i­nees for the bat­tle­ground ar­eas of San Fer­nan­do and San­gre Grande last Sat­ur­day, but didn’t, John con­firmed.

She ex­plained, “That was post­poned be­cause of the over­whelm­ing re­sponse we’ve re­ceived re­gard­ing nom­i­nees and the re­sult­ing high­ly com­pet­i­tive sit­u­a­tion with that. It was de­cid­ed to re-ex­am­ine nom­i­nees screened so far and we’ll screen the San Fer­nan­do and San­gre Grande ar­eas lat­er in the week.”