–Mayor Narine says, assures staff that money has been secured for payments

THE cash-strapped Mayor and City Council (M&CC) of Georgetown has announced that its employees will benefit from a five per cent retroactive salary increase for 2021 and a further five per cent increase for this year.

Speaking during a press briefing on Wednesday, the Mayor of Georgetown, Ubraj Narine, said that the Council had already secured funds to execute payments, but the technical aspect of tabulating that adjustment was being dealt with by the M&CC’s Information Technology (IT) department.

“The Council agreed that a five per cent increase in wages and salaries will be paid in December 2021 to all categories of staff, retroactive from January 2021. Further, the Council also agreed for an increase of five per cent in salaries and wages with immediate effect from January 2022. So, in total, staff will receive a 10 per cent salary increase, right across the board,” the Mayor related, adding that payments will be made by January 15.

“This money is already secured and I already spoke with the Treasurer and Town Clerk (ag), and payment of these monies ought to be made before the 15th of this month. It was supposed to be before December 31, but I was told that the IT department is currently working on the spreadsheet,” Narine said.

Questioned on how the cash-strapped municipality plans to fund this increase in expenditure given its known dire financial position, Mayor Narine said that the Council will be banking on increased revenue from a tax amnesty which is ongoing.

Essentially, the municipality, with over 600 staff, plans to sustain the increase entirely through the use of its own revenue.

“The City Council will pay all of this 10 per cent from normal revenue collection. The increase of revenue due to the amnesty that we called from December to March month end. Currently we have lots of applications and a lot of people coming forward to pay as well. We have default taxpayers who owe the City Council millions of dollars, and those [are] the areas we are looking to generate this kind of revenue,” the Mayor related.

In the same breath, he said that the Council makes approximately $2 billion annually, but it will need close to $7 billion to function properly.

According to Narine, the M&CC had initially received a missive from the Local Government Commission (LGC), advising the Council to pay its staff a seven per cent retroactive increase for 2021, as directed by Central Government.

Despite this advice, the Council’s finance committee decided that 10 per cent will be paid instead.

“The LGC had written to us for the seven per cent increase as approved by the Central Government, [and] the finance committee had deliberated and also asked for the same information and that is how we came up with the five per cent retroactive and 5 per cent for 2022,” Mayor Narine said.

He further related that the Council’s decision was influenced by the fact that workers of M&CC did not receive a salary increase in three years.

“The staff of MCC did not receive an increase in 2019 and 2020…the last increase was in 2018 and this is the fittest package the finance committee came up with, which the full Council approved,” Mayor Narine said.