- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 02/Jul 03:20

Costly CEPEP cull

THE GOVERNMENT’S gratuitous decision to terminate – without advanced notice – all contractors of the Community-Based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme (CEPEP) is not only cruel but also costly. Effecting this move, which has placed at least 10,000 workers on the breadline, CEPEP CEO Keith Eddy on June 27 wrote the parties telling them: “Payment in lieu of one month’s notice will be processed and remitted to you.” This alone could be as much as $33.4 million, since that was the extent of the company’s monthly subvention in 2023. But to hear the line minister, Barry Padarath, tell it, the decision to terminate abruptly is about safeguarding the treasury. Alleging impropriety in the award of three-year contracts on the eve of the April 28 general election, he suggested the PNM sought to lock the new government into unsustainable spending. “It raises serious questions as to why the Cabinet was not consulted with respect to millions, if not billions, of dollars,” he told this newspaper on June 27. “What they sought to do was to commit us to expenditures in the financial years of 2026, 2027 and 2028 without identifying where the funds are going to come from.” However, taxpayers will now have to bear the brunt of this rush to get rid of these workers. And for what? Mr Padarath has become a most prominent face within the new UNC government. Besides being Minister of Public Utilities, with CEPEP oversight, he is also Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister, as well as Government Whip in the House of Representatives. His training is in communications. It is inevitable to return to him repeatedly when discussing this administration. Which is why his unsympathetic stance disturbs. Mincing no words, he laid bare the political calculation behind the economics when he doubled down on the dismissals on June 29, saying, “Under my watch as line minister, CEPEP will not be a PNM party group.” The move, he asserts, is not about workers but contractors and corruption. Yet, it is simultaneously about freeing “people locked into a mindset of cutting grass.” Choose one. To examine the government’s claim that it seeks to tackle sleaze reveals glaring deficiencies, too. While audits are in train, officials have already come to conclusions about contractors en masse. But termination payouts will, presumably, still move forward for all, even though serious allegations of wrongdoing loom. The new government risks squandering political capital when it cannot afford to: CEPEP workers perform key functions by supplementing local government. It is a shame these workers, some of whom were in tears on Friday, have not been given more time to move on to greener pastures. Forget politics, that would have been a basic human courtesy. The post Costly CEPEP cull appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.