EOJ awaits budget approval for local gov’t elections
Published:Monday | December 19, 2022 | 1:16 AM
The Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) has signalled that if it is to be properly prepared for local government polls, which have been postponed until late February 2023, the election budget would have to be approved early in the new year.
“We are not where we want to be, but we await the approval of the budget,” said Director of Elections Glasspole Brown in a Gleaner interview Sunday.
If the Jamaica Labour Party-led Government sticks to its February deadline, Brown emphasised that funding would be needed in time to conduct the polls.
He said that the EOJ has started preliminary preparations in relation to low-budget items.
Brown told The Gleaner that the EOJ has started to identify election-day workers and personnel who would train them. However, he said the training would not commence until the budget was approved.
No allocation was set aside in the Second Supplementary Estimates tabled in Parliament a week ago for the EOJ to conduct elections. The Government had earmarked $30.4 billion to pay public servants under its new compensation system.
A third Supplementary Estimates is expected to be tabled early next year. It is not known whether the EOJ’s funding for local government polls will be allocated in that budget.
However, the Government has signalled that a significant amount of the resources will be allocated to pay the balance of public-sector workers that had not yet signed on to the compensation system.
In December 2021, Brown submitted a budget in the sum of $1 billion to the Ministry of Finance for approval as the February 2022 deadline for the holding of the polls was two months away.
Earlier this year, Parliament gave the nod to the Representation of the People (Postponement of Elections to Municipal Corporations and City Municipalities) Act (ROPA), 2022.
At that time, Local Government Minister Desmond McKenzie said that the elections were being postponed owing to an outbreak of the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
The Senate had also approved legislation, resulting in another postponement of the local government polls.
The local government polls, which are slated to be held over a four-year cycle, were last conducted on November 28, 2016. ROPA provides for a 90-day extension.