The Urban Development Commission (UDC) is unable to carry out its mandate since most of the money allocated to it goes into paying salaries and bills.
Director of the UDC, Derek Alleyne, in pointing out the dire situation of the state-run agency, also castigated the Barbados Labour Party for failing to do more for urban Barbados when “they had money to play with” shortly after the UDC was formed in 1997.
While addressing a meeting of the Democratic Labour Party St Michael Central branch on Sunday evening, Alleyne said that in 2003 the UDC had $26 million, while this year under his leadership, it received a mere $4.8 million. He explained that with the salary bill at $3.4 million and rent and other bills to be paid, the commission could not carry out its work mainly of repairing and replacing homes.
“For the last seven years the most money UDC has got for any given year was $6 million for everything, and salaries is $3.4 million. But two years straight, them get $26 million to run a campaign and there still got a whole lot of mash-up houses, toilets pits, all kind of things in urban Barbados,” Alleyne said. (LK)
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