Dear Source:
I write to congratulate Dwane Callwood on his article, "State of Emergency" recently published in the Source. Dwane said that nothing that he said in his article is written in stone and that is perhaps an appropriate statement to make thereby leaving room for compromise in seeking workable solutions. However, I hope that his position on the best use for the $45 million arrangement that our local politicians are working on will continue to be of concern to him. Over more than a dozen years, I have maintained that the back pay issue is nothing other than political game playing that fails to recognize that the average employee on main street or at any of our hotels or anyplace else in the private sector is being ignored and left behind during the machinations of devising ways to pay government employees, including some who have already expired and some who have long retired.
These machinations are, in my judgment intended for vote-getting purposes and the private sector employees who will be required to share the burden of financing the cost either directly or indirectly should condemn them. The $45 million that is currently the topic of debate is only a down payment on the overall estimated amount of $400 million. Even if we are able to raise the $400 million dollars that has been pledged to address the back-pay issue, that money can be better utilized to fund many other vital projects. If, in fact, there is no law requiring the government to pay back wages why are our politicians exploiting the temporary financial difficulties that we experienced earlier by resurrecting the back pay issue for personal benefit at this time? Can we truly defend the decision to pay hundreds of millions of public dollars in back pay solely on moral grounds, and especially so when the government did its best to avoid reducing staff during that critical time?
Dwane has recognized one very important place where the utilization of those monies can benefit the entire community when he discussed assisting WAPA. There are other projects including the recognition of the inter-island ferry service as a responsibility of the government to provide, combined with whatever mass transit federal funding is available to supplement our own funding efforts. I am sure that there is no difficulty in developing a list of viable public projects that would benefit all of the people rather than only government employees or the estates of deceased former government employees.
I also appreciate Dwane’s call for renegotiating our agreements with EDC beneficiaries to ensure that the territory is treated fairly while doing business with them.
Gaylord A Sprauve
St. Thomas
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