Lee An­na Ma­haraj

leean­na.ma­haraj@guardian.co.tt

To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine is dis­ap­point­ed with To­ba­go’s 4.3% Bud­get al­lo­ca­tion for the fis­cal year 2023.

To­ba­go’s to­tal as­signed $2.521 bil­lion, which is an in­crease from the $185 mil­lion re­ceived last year, is still 38.4% short of what the THA had ini­tial­ly re­quest­ed.

And Au­gus­tine made his feel­ing known mo­ments af­ter Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert de­liv­ered the Bud­get yes­ter­day.

“I can­not be com­fort­able or sat­is­fied with an al­lo­ca­tion that presents a short­fall of about 38.4% of 1.5 bil­lion dol­lars in my ad­min­is­tra­tion’s re­quest for 3.9 bil­lion for fis­cal 2023,” Au­gus­tine said dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence at the Red House af­ter­wards.

He not­ed that their re­quest was sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er com­pared to oth­er fi­nan­cial pe­ri­ods.

“This re­quest was the first re­quest in my en­tire ex­is­tence in the THA that fell un­der the 4 bil­lion dol­lars, so es­sen­tial­ly, it has been THA’s small­est re­quest for some time, and yet it was not com­plete­ly ful­filled,” he said.

Ref­er­enc­ing the 2001 Par­lia­ment meet­ing, where it was rec­om­mend­ed that the THA should re­ceive be­tween 4.3% and 6.9% of the na­tion­al bud­get, Au­gus­tine posit­ed that a pro­posed bill would have been ac­cept­ed.

“In fact, by law, the min­is­ter could have gone in there and giv­en us the 6.8% but he chose not to,” he said.

How­ev­er, he spec­u­lat­ed that Im­bert chose the al­lo­ca­tion based on the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion’s dis­tri­b­u­tion.

In re­sponse to some of the high­lights of the Bud­get, Au­gus­tine crit­i­cised the in­ter-is­land fare in­creas­es and the ad­di­tion­al al­lo­ca­tion for Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty.

He not­ed that ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty is al­ready a prob­lem faced by To­bag­o­ni­ans and the in­crease in fares on the air and sea bridges makes av­er­age life dif­fi­cult for cit­i­zens and To­bag­o­ni­ans in par­tic­u­lar.

“We do love you guys in Trinidad, but most of­ten when we fly here, we fly here for crit­i­cal ser­vices and not just be­cause we want to have a va­ca­tion, and for us, the air and sea bridge is a crit­i­cal part of our pub­lic trans­porta­tion in­fra­struc­ture be­cause one would ap­pre­ci­ate you can’t take a bus from Port-of-Spain to Scar­bor­ough, you have to take ei­ther the fer­ry or you go to Pi­ar­co and take a flight,” Au­gus­tine said.

Au­gus­tine al­so cit­ed med­ical and ed­u­ca­tion­al rea­sons as crit­i­cal ser­vices for the peo­ple of To­ba­go.

In ref­er­ence to the week­end mur­ders in To­ba­go, which took their death toll to eight, Au­gus­tine said in or­der to com­bat the is­sue of crime, a so­cial jus­tice plan and pol­i­cy is need­ed.

“Fix­ing the is­sues with na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty can­not just be build­ing new po­lice sta­tions, buy­ing new cars, buy­ing new … it has to be a broad­er plan. Where is our plan to trans­form our pris­ons in­to cor­rec­tion­al fa­cil­i­ties? Where is the bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion to fi­nal­ly build a cor­rec­tion­al fa­cil­i­ty in To­ba­go?” he said.