KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

Op­po­si­tion MPs are ac­cus­ing the Gov­ern­ment of at­tempt­ing to re­struc­ture the lo­cal gov­ern­ment map to give the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) an ad­van­tage at the next lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tion.

At a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) MPs Colm Im­bert, Mar­vin Gon­za­les and Ka­reem Mar­celle crit­i­cised the Gov­ern­ment’s plan to in­crease the num­ber of mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tions from 14 to 17, ques­tion­ing both the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the changes and the process used to ar­rive at the pro­posed new mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties.

The crit­i­cism fol­lows the Mu­nic­i­pal Cor­po­ra­tions (Amend­ment) Bill, 2026, which pro­pos­es the cre­ation of new mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties at Barataria, St Au­gus­tine and Cou­va, along with changes to sev­er­al ex­ist­ing mu­nic­i­pal bound­aries.

Im­bert said there had been in­ad­e­quate pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion and ques­tioned the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for cre­at­ing ad­di­tion­al bor­oughs.

He al­leged that the re­al ob­jec­tive was to cre­ate three new mu­nic­i­pal ar­eas in com­mu­ni­ties where the UNC be­lieves it has strong elec­toral sup­port.

“They’ve looked for ar­eas where UNC votes are con­cen­trat­ed and cre­at­ed these three imag­i­nary bor­oughs... So all this is an at­tempt; the UNC knows that they are in trou­ble. They know that if a lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tion was called now with the ex­ist­ing bound­aries, they would lose and lose bad­ly.”

Im­bert al­so ques­tioned how Barataria met the re­quire­ments for bor­ough sta­tus.

He al­so crit­i­cised the leg­is­la­tion for what he de­scribed as an ab­sence of mean­ing­ful lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­form, ar­gu­ing that in­creas­ing the num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions and chang­ing bound­aries did not ad­dress the fun­da­men­tal prob­lems fac­ing the sys­tem.

Mar­celle al­so ques­tioned the in­de­pen­dence of the process used to re­view the mu­nic­i­pal struc­ture.

He ac­cused Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Khadi­jah Ameen and the Gov­ern­ment of re­ly­ing on a com­mit­tee that he claimed in­clud­ed peo­ple who were UNC mem­bers. Mar­celle iden­ti­fied the com­mit­tee’s chair­man Stara Ram­lo­gan and com­mit­tee mem­bers Feeroz Khan and Pe­ter Kan­hai among those close­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with UNC.

How­ev­er, Ameen yes­ter­day re­ject­ed the Op­po­si­tion’s claims, in­stead in­sist­ing that the pro­posed changes are in­tend­ed to make the lo­cal gov­ern­ment sys­tem fair­er and bet­ter re­flect changes in pop­u­la­tion and de­vel­op­ment.

Ameen said, “This, in my view, is mean­ing­ful change that treats with is­sues of in­equity over the years that was de­cid­ed by a PNM cab­i­net to shift the bound­aries to ac­com­mo­date the PNM. The UNC has been talk­ing about this dis­par­i­ty in fund­ing in terms of the pop­u­la­tion size, the de­mo­graph­ic, the ge­o­graph­ic size as well and this has been an is­sue for many years. This is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring back fair­ness in­to the sys­tem.”

Sev­er­al PNM may­ors and mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tion chair­men at­tend­ed the press con­fer­ence, stand­ing along­side the Op­po­si­tion MPs in a show of sol­i­dar­i­ty.