PHILIPSBURG, Sint Maarten – Independent Member of Parliament Christophe Emmanuel on Sunday said that government paying NAf 15 million a year in property rental is neither tenable nor acceptable in a time when public and private sector workers are being asked to reduce their standard of living by accepting cuts forced upon them. In a time of austerity measures, the MP said, Naf 15 million annually in rent is a gross injustice to the people.
Emmanuel’s comments came on the heels of the Audit Chamber’s mini audit on government rental and housing policy. The audit revealed that government in essence does not have a policy that regulates its renting of property. He had already stated last week that the findings in the audit were alarming, but doubled-down on his comments after receiving the actual financial numbers.
The MP has questioned if government has attempted to re-negotiate some of the rental fees, if civil servants and/or their spouses own properties that government rents, if government is up to date on payments for all properties and what solutions does government have to address this issue. He went on to mention some of his own;
“The old post office building needs only repairs/renovation and we can move the tax department in there. There is enough property around the old Civil Registry building to expand that and accommodate the Court of Guardianship and CPS, those moves alone get rid of having to rent the Vineyard Building at exorbitant costs,” the MP said, adding that government need to conduct an efficiency study to determine how it can best utilize its own building such as the BTP Building which also has space to accommodate.
He said, for example, moving Civil Registry, CPS, Tax Department and Court of Guardianship out of the Vineyard Building and the Department of Statistics, Tourism Department from their location on Juancho Yrausquin Boulevard, would save government approximately NAf. 3 million annually, which could be put towards renovations and repairs of other government owned buildings that have been sitting unoccupied.
He said government is obviously not serious about cutting from within. He said moving forward government must take a serious look at its own waste and finally tackle the issue before even considering burdening workers financially. “People work years to build up a salary and benefits. Government’s responsibility is to ensure that its people can maintain a decent quality of life, not negatively affect that life through unreasonable actions against workers.
“People are not machines. You don’t just change the oil, close the hatch and carry on. You affect their entire lives, their entire future. It is already a disgrace to do this, but this government makes it worse by ignoring the shortcomings in the organization itself and doing things contrary to being in solidarity with the people. Things such as increasing garbage collection cost by an unexplained NAf 2 million when we are so-called broke,” MP Emmanuel said.
