Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

As the Mu­nic­i­pal Cor­po­ra­tions (Amend­ment) Bill 2026 is ex­pect­ed to be laid in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives to­day, Gov­ern­ment and Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tors shared their views on the pro­vi­sions con­tained in the pro­pos­al, with some ar­gu­ing that it would al­low com­mu­ni­ties to re­ceive a high­er qual­i­ty of ser­vice, while oth­ers ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of try­ing to re­draw bound­aries in their favour.

The bill seeks to in­crease the num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions from 14 to 17, up­grad­ing Ch­agua­nas to a city, con­vert­ing San­gre Grande to a bor­ough and in­tro­duc­ing Barataria, St Au­gus­tine and Cou­va as sep­a­rate bor­oughs.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia out­side Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence Do­minic Smith said he was sup­port­ive of the pro­vi­sions in the bill, not­ing that it sought to cre­ate eq­ui­ty among dif­fer­ent cor­po­ra­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly in light of con­cerns of ris­ing pop­u­la­tions in some dis­tricts.

“The fact of the mat­ter is that there has been a large num­ber of con­stituents; the coun­cil­lors have been un­able to nec­es­sar­i­ly treat with the large vol­ume of peo­ple they are re­spon­si­ble for, so I think it’s more a po­si­tion of cre­at­ing a lev­el of eq­ui­ty across the board, across the cor­po­ra­tions.”

Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Hous­ing Phillip Ed­ward Alexan­der de­clined to speak on the bill be­fore it was laid in the Low­er House, but promised to make clear his stance when it was brought to the Sen­ate.

Gov­ern­ment Sen­a­tor Bri­an Baig en­dorsed the bill de­spite con­cerns raised by the Op­po­si­tion.

“All I would say is that it’s an ex­cel­lent bill. It’s re­al­ly for­ward-think­ing, I ful­ly sup­port it and I ful­ly sup­port the move of my Prime Min­is­ter.”

How­ev­er, Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Dr Amery Browne was crit­i­cal of the bill, de­scrib­ing it as a “patch­work” of treat­ing with fall­out from UNC coun­cil­lors and ac­cused the gov­ern­ment of try­ing to “re-draw” the lo­cal gov­ern­ment map to give them­selves an up­per hand in the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment elec­tions.

Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Fos­ter Cum­mings al­so ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of try­ing to ma­nip­u­late pro­posed bound­aries through the bill to their ad­van­tage by push­ing mar­gin­al com­mu­ni­ties away from tra­di­tion­al PNM com­mu­ni­ties.