FOUR years after the Ministry of Finance conducted an audit of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and found that 262 staff members were needed, the agency still remains at the same capacity.

Executive Director of the EPA, Dr. Vincent Adams, said permits have doubled since 2015 from 585 to over 1,000 while compliance monitoring went up eight times from 74 to 606 and the complaints quadrupled from 164 to 624.

According to Dr. Adams, the Ministry of Finance had done an audit of the agency and found that 262 staff members were required to satisfy the workload of the agency. At the time of the audit, the agency had 100 staff and since then it has been running at the same level, even though the workload has increased significantly.

“Yet here again we remain at about 100 staff while the work is going up…this is why the agency can slip and cannot meet certain needs,” said Dr. Adams during a recent interview with the Guyana Chronicle.

Operations have, however, picked up said Dr. Adams, adding that the agency hired about 20 persons since the start of 2019.

Even though the EPA is not up to capacity in terms of skills, he believes that the agency has young staff members who are enthusiastic and willing to go the extra mile.
“One of the things we have started doing is exposing them to a lot of training. They are going to a lot of international conferences to rub shoulders with the experts throughout the world and build that network,” said Dr. Adams, adding that the workers are also joining international associations to build their network.

The training, he said, is being offered to workers so that the agency itself can be elevated to a world class level, especially at a time when the EPA is going to be dealing with world class operations in the oil and gas sector.

Aside from the human resource aspect, the agency has been acquiring equipment to ensure that it can go offshore to measure concentrations of contaminants in the water and air.

“Although we are improving, a lot of places still remained inaccessible, especially in the interior because we did not have a whole lot of vehicles,” said Dr. Adams, adding that this year alone, the agency purchased six new vehicles.
In addition, as part of further efforts to improve accessibility and reach people, the agency constructed two new offices in Essequibo and Berbice.

The agency had opened a new office in Whim and is in the process of opening up new offices in Linden and Anna Regina.

Dr. Adams said in preparing the agency’s budget for next year, he has made provisions for the agency to go out and utilise the new offices.

“The whole thing is to reach people rather than having people to be inconvenienced…the intent is to serve the public,” said the executive director.

He said the entire agency is being reorganised because it was not organised properly in the past. With all the work that is going on, Dr. Adams termed this year as a discovery year and said that real transformation will happen in 2020.