Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

De­spite the in­sis­tence from Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Khadi­jah Ameen that the bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion to PNM-led re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions was sig­nif­i­cant­ly larg­er than the UNC’s cor­po­ra­tions, mem­bers of the Op­po­si­tion con­tend that the avail­able fund­ing would bare­ly be enough to cov­er much-need­ed main­te­nance and re­pairs.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions be­fore en­ter­ing Par­lia­ment on Fri­day af­ter­noon, Ameen de­fend­ed the cur­rent bud­getary al­lo­ca­tions and dis­missed al­le­ga­tions of po­lit­i­cal favouritism, not­ing that PNM cor­po­ra­tions were ben­e­fit­ing from more fund­ing than their UNC coun­ter­parts. “What I can tell you is, if you cal­cu­late all the al­lo­ca­tions to all the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions and you to­tal the PNM and you to­tal the UNC, the PNM cor­po­ra­tions ac­tu­al­ly have more in terms of the al­lo­ca­tion,” Ameen said.

How­ev­er, Diego Mar­tin Cen­tral MP Symon De No­bri­ga said he was not con­vinced that the cur­rent al­lo­ca­tion would im­prove the qual­i­ty of life for res­i­dents in PNM con­stituen­cies, as he warned of wors­en­ing in­fra­struc­ture and ser­vices.

He said fig­ures showed a sig­nif­i­cant drop in the al­lo­ca­tion for the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion from $6 mil­lion in fis­cal 2025 to on­ly $500,000 for road­works for fis­cal 2026. De No­bri­ga com­pared this to the Princes Town Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion’s al­lo­ca­tion for drainage, which grew from $6 mil­lion in the last fis­cal year to $10 mil­lion for fis­cal 2026.

“What should al­so be wor­ry­ing to any­one who lives in any PNM con­stituen­cy is re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture for things like oth­er con­tract­ed ser­vices, for things like scav­eng­ing and wa­ter truck­ing, has been re­duced by mil­lions of dol­lars.

“So what does that mean for some­one who lives in Mar­aval, Dibe, Co­corite, Bel­mont, St James, or any com­mu­ni­ty in a PNM con­stituen­cy?

“That means that you can ex­pect that once your garbage col­lec­tion will be se­vere­ly im­pact­ed, and two, it means that you will prob­a­bly not get any roads done through your lo­cal gov­ern­ment au­thor­i­ty be­cause that $500,000 al­lo­ca­tion to the cor­po­ra­tion now has to be split over some­times ten dif­fer­ent dis­tricts.”

Chair­man of the PNM and for­mer pub­lic util­i­ties min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les al­so ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of mar­gin­al­is­ing PNM con­stituen­cies, not­ing that no al­lo­ca­tions were made avail­able to the North West Wa­ter Im­prove­ment Pro­gramme, which sought to im­prove wa­ter sup­ply to com­mu­ni­ties in Bel­mont, Paramin, Diego Mar­tin, and parts of Laven­tille.

Gon­za­les said he was “as­ton­ished” to learn that there were al­lo­ca­tions made to the pro­gramme.