Minority seeks Pres Weekes help in getting office space

Since their inauguration on January 26, 2017 as members of the the Minority Council of the Tobago House of Assembly (THA), leader Watson Duke, Assemblyman Farley Augustine and Councillor Faith BYisrael has been using the open air James Park, Scarborough as the Minority’s Office.

On Tuesday, BYisrael reported that the Minority has written to President Paula Mae Weekes, asking her to intervene so that the members could have assigned office space in the interest of democracy, justice and fair play.

At the Council’s media briefing at James Park on Tuesday, BYisrael said they were patiently awaiting word from both the Office of the Chief Secretary, as well as the Office of the Chief Administrator on the matter of office space.

“Again, we are here, in the month of July 2018, still at James Park, the only space that the Minority Council has as an office space.

“The Office of the Chief Secretary is responsible for getting an office for the Minority Leader. Therefore, the accounting officer who is responsible for that is the Chief Administrator.

“We have been waiting patiently, we are now a year and a half waiting patiently, so we took the step of writing to the President … and we got confirmation that this letter was received, asking for her office to please intervene on our behalf, because we know that she is a woman of principle and she is a woman who would want to ensure that the level of democracy that Tobagonians deserve is actually experienced at the Tobago House of Assembly,” she said.

BYisrael added:

“We would all be very keen to accept and very keen to understand that this level of unfairness simply cannot continue. We are here a year and a half after the elections and the office of the Minority Leader is still nowhere to be seen. We were shown an office space, we were shown several office spaces and when we last went around, we were shown an office space that we all agreed that this was suitable and that we would get it. We accepted and again we have heard nothing,” she said.

On January 30, members of the Minority Council were given a tour of proposed office space at #2 Hamilton Street in Scarborough, by both staff of the Assembly Legislature and Property Management Unit of the THA.

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"Minority seeks Pres Weekes help in getting office space"

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