UPDATE: 500 PoS workers sent home; mayor warns of sanitation crisis

Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­[email protected]

The hun­dreds of work­ers sent home last year from the Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) and the Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP) could cre­ate a sce­nario where it will be dif­fi­cult to main­tain es­sen­tial san­i­ta­tion ser­vices for the Car­ni­val sea­son in the cap­i­tal, Port-of-Spain May­or Chin­ua Al­leyne has re­vealed.

How­ev­er, the may­or still hopes to get the job done with the staff he has with­in the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion (PoSCC) dur­ing the height of the sea­son.

Speak­ing at a PoSCC Statu­to­ry Meet­ing yes­ter­day, Al­leyne said more than 500 CEPEP and URP work­ers who were op­er­at­ing in the city were dis­missed when the Gov­ern­ment purged the sys­tems and scrapped the pro­grammes last year. He said these work­ers were sub­se­quent­ly re­placed by just 12 staff mem­bers from the new Na­tion­al Pro­gramme for the Up­keep of Pub­lic Spaces — a move he warned could jeop­ar­dise pub­lic health, san­i­ta­tion and pub­lic safe­ty.

“These cuts will cre­ate se­ri­ous chal­lenges for the City Cor­po­ra­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly as we pre­pare for Car­ni­val 2026,” Al­leyne said.

“In the city alone, more than 500 peo­ple who were do­ing day-to-day work clean­ing and main­tain­ing our com­mu­ni­ties have been sent home. They have been re­placed with 12 work­ers. In our view, the health and well­ness of the peo­ple of Port-of-Spain are be­ing put at risk.”

At the end of June last year, Gov­ern­ment ter­mi­nat­ed 300-plus CEPEP con­trac­tors, which re­sult­ed in an es­ti­mat­ed 10,000 work­ers un­der them be­ing left with­out jobs. An­oth­er 928 peo­ple were al­so ter­mi­nat­ed from the URP as the min­istry con­duct­ed an au­dit in­to its ac­tiv­i­ties. The Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment sub­se­quent­ly launched the Na­tion­al Pro­gramme for the Up­keep of Pub­lic Spaces to fill the void left by the two pro­grammes.

Al­leyne added that oth­er re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions face sim­i­lar woes af­ter tens of thou­sands of sim­i­lar work­ers from the CEPEP and URP pro­grammes were dis­missed, mean­ing oth­er re­gions across Trinidad have been af­fect­ed by a short­age of man­pow­er with which to con­duct san­i­ta­tion and oth­er ser­vices.

The may­or al­so said dras­tic bud­get re­duc­tions to the cor­po­ra­tion, in­clud­ing an al­most 80 per cent cut in in­fra­struc­ture fund­ing and a 40 per cent re­duc­tion in garbage col­lec­tion al­lo­ca­tions, were al­so ham­per­ing the cor­po­ra­tion’s abil­i­ty to pro­vide full ser­vices to its burgess­es.

He said the cuts al­so mean the cor­po­ra­tion is un­able to set­tle out­stand­ing debts from pre­vi­ous projects or un­der­take new in­fra­struc­tur­al work through­out fis­cal 2026.

He raised con­cerns about what he de­scribed as an un­even dis­tri­b­u­tion of lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­sources. While Port-of-Spain has suf­fered steep re­duc­tions, oth­er mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties have re­ceived sig­nif­i­cant in­creas­es. Garbage col­lec­tion fund­ing in one mu­nic­i­pal­i­ty near­ly dou­bled, while Ch­agua­nas Bor­ough record­ed an in­crease of more than 120 per cent in its in­fra­struc­ture bud­get, he said.

De­spite the chal­lenges, Al­leyne as­sured res­i­dents and vis­i­tors that the City Coun­cil re­mains com­mit­ted to de­liv­er­ing a suc­cess­ful Car­ni­val.

“Notwith­stand­ing un­prece­dent­ed in­ter­fer­ence in street clean­ing, em­ploy­ment and garbage col­lec­tion, the coun­cil has re­solved to do what­ev­er it takes to en­sure Car­ni­val 2026 is more suc­cess­ful than Car­ni­val 2025. Rest as­sured, when Ash Wednes­day comes, the pub­lic will see a clean cap­i­tal city,” he said.

He urged cit­i­zens and vis­i­tors to con­tin­ue sup­port­ing Car­ni­val ac­tiv­i­ties, promis­ing a safe, se­cure and wel­com­ing city through­out the fes­ti­val sea­son.

Ed­i­tor’s note: A pre­vi­ous ver­sion of this sto­ry re­port­ed that 500 work­ers were sent home from the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion. The May­or has since clar­i­fied that the 500 work­ers he re­ferred to were from the CEPEP and URP pro­grammes. We apol­o­gise for the er­ror.