Gail Alexan­der

?Af­ter Mon­day night's Low­er House pas­sage of the bill to ex­tend the life of mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tions, the bill heads for the Sen­ate - and an un­cer­tain po­si­tion - this morn­ing. The Sen­ate will al­so de­bate an­oth­er bill on Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment re­form.

Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Hazel Man­ning will pi­lot both bills at 10 am to­day in the Up­per House af­ter pas­sage of the bill to ex­tend the term of cor­po­ra­tions in the Low­er House Mon­day night.

That bill ef­fec­tive­ly post­pones Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment polls for a year un­til Ju­ly 2010. By agree­ment with the Op­po­si­tion in the Low­er House, the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment re­form bill has al­so been sent to a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee. While pas­sage of the ex­ten­sion bill re­quired a sim­ple ma­jor­i­ty in the Low­er House - and there­fore no Op­po­si­tion sup­port - the bill re­quires the sup­port of at least one In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor in the Up­per House.

Cer­tain In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors - Sub­has Ramkhelawan, Gail Mer­hair and Dana See­ta­hal - have stat­ed po­si­tions against post­pone­ment of elec­tions. In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Ramesh De­osaran has not stat­ed how he will vote. Nor have oth­er In­de­pen­dents, Michael An­nisette, Basharat Ali, He­len Dray­ton, Corinne Bap­tiste McK­night and An­nette Nichol­son-Al­fred.

There are nine In­de­pen­dents, six Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tors and 15 Gov­ern­ment sen­a­tors. The lat­ter num­ber in­cludes votes of 15 Gov­ern­ment Sen­a­tors and a 16th held by the Sen­ate Pres­i­dent. Sources not­ed that if a Sen­ate vote is dead­locked on a mat­ter, the Sen­ate's pre­sid­ing of­fi­cer will cast his vote to pre­serve the sta­tus quo –that is to al­low the bill to fail and pre­serve the dead­lock.