By Erica James-King, Staff ReporterWESTERN BUREAU:
THE ST. James Parish Council on Tuesday revamped its $430 million budget for 2004-2005 financial year, which was rejected by the Ministry of Local Government. The new budget is $393 million, $37 million less than the initial figure.
Last week, the Council reported that the Local Government Ministry had refused to approve the original budget submitted by the Council, and instead ordered that it dramatically reduce the figures. The financial blueprint submitted to the Ministry by the Council exceeded its budgetary expenditure for last year by $69 million.
"The Ministry generally has a budget review with each parish. Coming out of that review the Ministry has encouraged us at the St. James Parish Council to recast our budget," stated Claudette Corbett, acting secretary/manager of the St. James Parish Council.
In a bid to revise the financial plan, the Finance and Administration Committee of the St. James Parish Council, and officers of the Council met in a marathon meeting on Tuesday and succeeded in slashing the budget to the new figure.
"We had a very successful meeting. In fact at the end of Tuesday's meeting, we arrived at a new budget of $393 million," Councillor Cecil Davis, Deputy Mayor of the St. James Parish Council told The Financial Gleaner in an interview conducted earlier this week. This revised budget figure is still substantially more than what the Local Government Ministry is proposing for the St. James Parish Council for this year.
The Ministry has recommended a budget of $368 million for the Council for 2004/2005.
FINANCIAL PLAN
The money earmarked for street light expenditure got a beating, during the six-hour meeting on Tuesday by the Council to cut and carve its financial plan.
"We took the decision to reduce the planned allocation for street lights from $103 million to $70 million. The latter figure is in keeping with our expenditure on streetlights for last year," said the Deputy Mayor who is head of the Council's finance and administration committee.
One concern that looms large for the Council, is the question of how it will be able to finance solid waste collection and disposal in the parish this year. In the budget it had proposed for 2004/2005, the Council had estimated $101 million for garbage services provided by Western Parks and Markets. But this is just a drop in the bucket, of the $211 million that WPM has been demanding from the council for solid waste disposal, reports Councillor Davis.
The Council contends that it is objecting to the WPM's demands since they include a recommendation for the Council to foot part of the garbage collection bill for some of the other western parishes.
In the meantime, Deputy Mayor Councillor Cecil Davis is warning the Council that it will have to do a lot of belt-tightening, as the budget that the Ministry is proposing for St. James is much lower than what it approved for the parish last year. He laments that even though last year central government had approved $388 million for the Council, there was a shortfall of some $27 million in terms of the actual financing that the Council got from central government.
"We seem to be headed for a worst situation than we were in last year when the Ministry approved $388 million, yet we only received $361 million," bemoaned the Deputy Mayor. "The Council's actual expenditure amounted to $363 million and we had to come up with ways of filling the shortfall in the budget."
DEFICIENCIES
He explained that last year, since the Council did not get all the money it was earmarked to get, it had to fill some of the deficiencies with money it collected from building fees.
According to the Deputy Mayor, the revised financial blueprint for 2004/2005 will be submitted to the Local Government Ministry by Tuesday of next week.
Meanwhile, addressing the recent monthly sitting of the Parish Council, Councillor Gerard Mitchell of the Mount Salem Division urged the Council to implement innovative ways of addressing the deficit in revenue available for financing the budget. Expressing similar sentiments, Councillor Richard Solomone of the Spring Garden division stated, "We have to look at strengthening our revenue collections and to increase user fees... while tightening expenditure."
