Man­ag­ing a coun­try is nev­er easy. Man­ag­ing a coun­try in tran­si­tion is even more chal­leng­ing as the pace of change varies, some­times slow, some­times fast and ac­cord­ing to Mur­phy’s law, any­thing that can go wrong will go wrong. With change comes pol­i­cy chal­lenges and com­mu­ni­ca­tion choic­es. Which pol­i­cy op­tions and how best to com­mu­ni­cate the choic­es? How will the mes­sages be re­ceived? There are no easy an­swers. One must sim­ply do the best that can be done in the cir­cum­stances.

Last week, there was good news in the pos­i­tive per­for­mance of T&T’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive at the Miss World com­pe­ti­tion in In­dia and in the IMF re­port which pro­ject­ed mod­est growth even though there is still much to be done. Pas­tor Brown, a 67-year-old SRP work­ing with the SSA made some trou­bling rev­e­la­tions which jus­ti­fied the on­go­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion. A ma­jor WASA pipeline failed, pil­ing ad­di­tion­al pres­sure on an al­ready weak wa­ter in­fra­struc­ture. Then there were prop­er­ty tax is­sues which re­sult­ed in an emer­gency bill. There were the cus­tom­ary high crime dra­mas led by the “House of Hor­rors” fol­lowed by a shoot­ing ram­page at Harpe Place, East Dry Riv­er in Port-of-Spain, dur­ing which five peo­ple in­clud­ing a po­lice sergeant were killed.

Pas­tor Brown's rev­e­la­tions are trou­bling and raise sev­er­al ques­tions about the lack of over­sight. Who will guard the guards? This ques­tion should have been an­tic­i­pat­ed and ap­pro­pri­ate mech­a­nisms de­vised and in­sti­tut­ed. If they were, what hap­pened to these mech­a­nisms? Un­til and un­less these over­sight mech­a­nisms are prop­er­ly im­ple­ment­ed there will be oth­er in­ves­ti­ga­tions.

The im­ple­men­ta­tion of the prop­er­ty tax and the pro­posed amend­ment to the prop­er­ty tax rate sig­nal an­oth­er plan­ning fail­ure. Valu­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 400,000 prop­er­ties was al­ways go­ing to cre­ate lo­gis­ti­cal and trans­paren­cy is­sues. How many staff are there in the val­u­a­tion di­vi­sion? And what com­par­a­tive mar­ket da­ta was used to guide the val­u­a­tion ex­er­cise? If none, what rule of thumb prin­ci­ples are em­ployed? None of this in­for­ma­tion is cur­rent­ly avail­able to house­hold­ers. Aren’t house­hold­ers en­ti­tled to know? Many in­di­vid­u­als have not re­ceived No­tices of Val­u­a­tion but have re­ceived as­sess­ment no­tices and had no op­por­tu­ni­ty to ob­ject.

It was sig­nif­i­cant that the min­is­ter gave no specifics in his speech. How many no­tices of val­u­a­tion have been is­sued com­pared to the num­ber of ob­jec­tions? How were the val­u­a­tions done? And how do the val­u­a­tions com­pare be­tween ar­eas? In­stead, the min­is­ter spoke anec­do­tal­ly say­ing “pri­mar­i­ly in the mid­dle and up­per lev­els, there have been sev­er­al cas­es that the an­nu­al rental val­ues were not con­sis­tent with ex­pec­ta­tions of prop­er­ty own­ers …” an in­fer­ence with so­ciopo­lit­i­cal over­tones de­signed to down­play the ob­jec­tions. How did these val­u­a­tions com­pare with mar­ket rents?

Clear­ly, there were many ob­jec­tions. The 33 per cent re­duc­tion is sig­nif­i­cant and de­signed to mol­li­fy com­plainants. Prop­er­ty tax has been around since 2009. This ad­min­is­tra­tion has been in of­fice for nine years and has had more than enough time to pre­pare and plan to im­ple­ment this tax. A prop­er­ly planned ex­er­cise would have made this da­ta avail­able and sub­ject to em­pir­i­cal test­ing by rep­utable val­u­a­tion prac­ti­tion­ers to gain agree­ment and com­pli­ance. The need for plan­ning and or­gan­i­sa­tion ap­plies equal­ly to WASA and the crime sit­u­a­tion.

When can we ex­pect an im­prove­ment in the method­olo­gies used to ad­dress these chal­lenges?