How to spend $1 million

Municipal corporations got an extra million dollars each to spend on managing covid19 in their budgets. Rural Development and Local Government Minister Kazim Hosein met virtually with the mayors and chairmen responsible for street level management of government services to discuss how the money was to be spent to protect public sector workers in the execution of their duties and to improve public sanitisation and essential services such as water trucking.

He also discussed easing bottlenecks in accessing funds, because cash flow is critical in an environment in which the immediacy of cash payments has trumped the convenience and incomplete infrastructure of digital transactions.

It's a sensible move, but one that should come with formal policy guidelines and accountability measures to ensure that the money is spent appropriately for each district.

There are certainly common issues to all corporations, but the Local Government Minister must work in concert with those elected to manage communities, right down to the street level of councillors, to ensure that the needs, both current and anticipated, of the public are met. That’s going to mean doing more than just dispensing additional funds. It will demand mechanisms that enable the public and the councillors who are responsible for the practical implementation of local governance to report on issues and act in near real-time.

Globally, the importance of local government in managing and monitoring the response of communities to the covid19 threat and the reality of isolation measures has been at the forefront of central government planning.

Now, more than at any recent time apart from elections, the most critical information about communities must filter up to government from elected representatives and public workers operating at the street and community level.

That’s going to mean new measures to gather information with immediacy in a system that’s been geared for too long in discussions in council rooms and a far more casual pace of reporting on communities and districts.

It will call for councillors, public sector workers and mayors to be more responsive to emerging situations in the areas of TT for which they hold elected responsibility and to be supported by systems that enable rapid response when it is needed. There must be greater cooperation and collaboration between local government leaders to discuss evolving best practices in a management engagement for which the world is still writing the rulebook.

The traditional lethargy of the public sector must vanish in the face of the challenges of covid19 and the engine of local governance returned, with the help of central government, to respond more quickly and effectively to community needs.