Friday, April 26, 2013

Lorne aplogizes to Choiseulians

At exactly 11:15am the our Parliamentary Rep stood up to deliver his presentation to this financial year's estimates of expenditure.
With a frown, characteristic of him, and which seem to have been pasted on his forehead throughout his presentation, he began by apologizing to his constituents for his poor showing in the constituency and vowed, "This will never happen again."
Lorne displayed quite a level of confidence this time around, though I thought sometimes that his demeanor may be carrying him overboard, and boy, that frown.
He took a heavy swipe at the former tourism minister for his largese at using the island's financies. He in more ways than one explained how his ministry is doing a lot better that the former tourism ministry- visitor arrivals up, cruise ship arrivals up etc.
This post will pay more attention to the Rep's last 15 minutes which he dedicated to his Constituency.
He boasts of in spite of his prolonged absence he has a strong Costituency group in place. In point form he made these disclosures:
NICE: 49 persons were employed and has paid up about $629,000.
STEP: 1294 persons employed
SMALL PROJECTS: 43 small contractors were employed. 172 workers and approximately $1.4m paid. ( Was Satney on of these contractors or was he heading the whole program?)
STIMULUS PACKAGE: 34 persons were employed at a cost of $115,000.
He went on the state that the Piaye playing field will be upgraded to a premier Cricket facility under the Constituency Development program. ( Have he forgotten the lighting for the La Fargue playing field?)
With $2m allocated for bridges he hopes that the Devil's Bridge (Pon George) will receive attention this financial year. He also made a case for at least the Jetrine or Daban bridge to be given attention.
The deplorable state of the Park Estate, Fiette, and Balca road was mentioned and the Rep is hoping to give relief to the residents by addressing these roads with funds from CDP and the Ministry of infrastructure. He continued by saying that drainage works have already begun on these roads (not Park Estate for sure)
He concluded by giving kudos to the Constituency Council whom he said is not at the behest, or fuel the agenda of the Rep, as if to suggest that was a thing of the past.
In closing he promise to be more visible throughout the constituency. Time alone will tell. A politician's promise?

Sent from my BlackBerry® device from Digicel

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