Less than two weeks af­ter hun­dreds of Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion em­ploy­ees en­dured de­lays in re­ceiv­ing their June salaries, the Cor­po­ra­tion is once again await­ing Gov­ern­ment ap­proval for ad­di­tion­al fund­ing to meet its pay­roll oblig­a­tions.

May­or Chin­ua Al­leyne said cor­re­spon­dence re­quest­ing a fur­ther salary al­lo­ca­tion was sub­mit­ted to the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment on Mon­day, but the Cor­po­ra­tion is still await­ing ap­proval from the Min­istry of Fi­nance be­fore the funds can be re­leased.

The lat­est fund­ing un­cer­tain­ty fol­lows last month’s pay­roll cri­sis, when more than 400 month­ly-paid em­ploy­ees, in­clud­ing City Po­lice of­fi­cers, went with­out their June salaries af­ter the Cor­po­ra­tion said it had ex­haust­ed its al­lo­ca­tion for wages. The Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment sub­se­quent­ly re­leased just over $2.18 mil­lion to cov­er the June pay­roll, but Al­leyne warned at the time that there were no al­lo­ca­tions in place for salaries for Ju­ly, Au­gust and Sep­tem­ber, cau­tion­ing that an­oth­er short­fall was like­ly un­less ad­di­tion­al fund­ing was ap­proved.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Al­leyne said he had been ad­vised by the Cor­po­ra­tion’s CEO that the lat­est re­quest re­mains pend­ing.

Al­leyne said the Cor­po­ra­tion has com­plet­ed its part of the process and is now await­ing ac­tion by the rel­e­vant min­istries.

“The re­quest is in from the Port-of-Spain Cor­po­ra­tion to the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment. They have our re­quest. It is now up to them to process it and see to it that the process is com­plet­ed and that we re­ceive the re­leas­es that we re­quire.”

The may­or ex­pressed hope that the nec­es­sary fund­ing would be ap­proved be­fore work­ers are once again af­fect­ed, as the Cor­po­ra­tion con­tin­ues en­gag­ing the min­istry to se­cure the ad­di­tion­al al­lo­ca­tion need­ed to meet its pay­roll com­mit­ments.