Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

The Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) is de­fend­ing Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath’s over­sight of the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA), fol­low­ing claims that the Gov­ern­ment may be over­step­ping its in­volve­ment at the State util­i­ty.

PSA pres­i­dent Fe­l­isha Thomas yes­ter­day dis­missed such crit­i­cisms as po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed, point­ing to past in­stances of di­rect in­ter­fer­ence by pre­vi­ous of­fice­hold­ers.

“The min­is­ter and the Gov­ern­ment set the strate­gic di­rec­tion for the en­ti­ty,” Thomas said.

“So, I think his com­ment in re­la­tion to tak­ing a keen in­ter­est in WASA is about how we im­prove the wa­ter sup­ply to the pop­u­la­tion.”

On Tues­day, it was re­vealed that nine mem­bers of WASA’s board had re­signed, in­clud­ing its chair­man. As such, Padarath said he was in­struct­ing CEO Kei­throy Hal­l­i­day, whom he said he had a good work­ing re­la­tion­ship with.

“I have been spend­ing a lot of my days and nights at WASA be­cause in the ab­sence of a board, the man­age­ment and op­er­a­tions of WASA does not stop and while we cam­paigned on the elec­tion trail a lot on is­sues that im­pact State en­ter­pris­es like WASA, it al­so re­quires us to bring about short-term and long-term changes to the or­gan­i­sa­tion. So, the or­gan­i­sa­tion is not rud­der­less with­out a board,” Padarath said.

Padarath dis­missed any thought of it be­ing po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence.

But speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Thomas said Padarath’s re­cent fo­cus on WASA was not ex­ces­sive. She ar­gued that over­sight and re­form were es­sen­tial to re­build­ing pub­lic trust in the util­i­ty’s per­for­mance.

At the same time, she cau­tioned against what she de­scribed as “dou­ble stan­dards” by some mem­bers of the Op­po­si­tion.

“Mar­vin Gon­za­les should be the last per­son talk­ing about over­step­ping,” Thomas said.

“He has over­stepped every sin­gle line when it comes to the op­er­a­tions of WASA, so he should re­frain from mak­ing such state­ments.”

She em­pha­sised the need for con­struc­tive di­a­logue and col­lab­o­ra­tive gov­er­nance mov­ing for­ward.

“What the pop­u­la­tion needs is sus­tain­able im­prove­ment in ser­vice de­liv­ery and that means strate­gic re­form, trans­paren­cy, and lis­ten­ing to the voic­es of work­ers,” Thomas said.