Government’s roll-out of the National Programme for the Upkeep of Public Spaces, with a specific focus on Carnival, will cost just over TT$5.3 million.
This was revealed by Minister of Rural Development and Local Government Khadijah Ameen as she defended the short-term expansion of the Public Spaces Programme.
The initiative, which adds 86 teams with a total of over 1,000 workers for four weeks, sees these short-term employees deployed across all 14 Regional Corporations to prepare and clean up public spaces.
“The special project for Carnival is a one-month that Cabinet has already approved, and I’ll tell you the value of it is $5.36 million, and that amount is to pay the workers that we have taken, where we have 86 teams of persons for four weeks. So it’s a fixed number of workers for a fixed number of days. And at the end of our pilot project, our initial pilot project in March, we will gather the data, the recommendations from the various municipalities as well as our stakeholders, because our unions, for instance, have been part of our conversation, and therefore, we will have those recommendations for Cabinet.”
The Minister justified the programme, noting that short-term hiring during the season has always existed.
“All of them would usually hire short-term employees as well as additional services such as trucks to pick up garbage and so on. So they usually have a Carnival Programme. So the hiring of short-term employees for Carnival is nothing new. This time though, the Ministry is hiring the workers and sending them to the Corporation. So it’s a savings for the Corporation so they don’t have to go through that expense, but it also saves them on overtime for their existing workers.”