Georgetown budget narrative contradicts line items

Dear Editor,

Earlier this week, with April almost behind us, the Mayor and City Council of Georgetown approved Budget 2026^[1]. A budget is meant to set the tone for a council’s year. This one arrives with a third of that year already spent, and not for the first time. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, eh? For nearly four months this municipality has operated without an approved expenditure framework, which means every dollar that has gone out since 1st January has been spent under some authority other than a budget this chamber ratified. When the document finally reached the floor, it authorised G$5.7 billion in expenditure against G$4.4 billion in projected revenue. The reasons it does not withstand scrutiny follow.

Of every G$100 the Council collected in 2025, G$78.65 went to employment costs and the overheads that accompany having staff. Employment Cost of G$1.591 billion and Employment Overhead of G$259 million together consumed G$1.850 billion of the G$2.353 billion the Council took in. Twenty-one cents on the dollar was left for everything else this municipality exists to do. Capital expenditure took nothing, because nothing was left. Call this what it is: a payroll vehicle with some residual municipal activity attached, and the budget just passed entrenches the arrangement rather than changing it.

The collection pattern across the Council’s revenue lines reveals where the machinery actually functions and where it does not. Markets collected 89 percent of budget because vendors who do not pay lose the stall. Container Fees collected 103.8 percent because containers are tracked at the port and fees are taken before release. Rates and Taxes, the line that depends on the Council’s own billing and collection, collected 52.5 percent. Other Income, similarly dependent on the Council’s own systems, collected 54.5 percent. Every line where an external party controls the collection performs at or above target. Every line where the Council itself controls it performs at roughly half, which is the consequence of a PNC-run council whose political priorities do not include the collection discipline required to make its own systems work and whose leadership has never demanded otherwise.

The mechanism by which this is preserved is visible in plain sight. On page 14, in the Summary of Key Financial Indicators itself, as item seven on the list, the Council discloses that its Accounts Receivable of G$7.695 billion is “an approximate figure since several general rates account may have errors.” On page 23, Section 4.2, it further discloses that it does not currently have an approved balance sheet. Neither admission is a footnote. One is an enumerated indicator of the Council’s own financial position.

The other is the stated reason the Council cannot bring receivables and payables into its operating budget at all. A council whose ledger contains errors on ordinary residential and commercial billing cannot pursue recovery against any ratepayer with confidence, and cannot produce a defensible schedule of delinquents, including the state agencies the Council’s political leadership routinely blames for its revenue shortfalls. That particular narrative, which positions central government as stymieing municipal work, should be dispensed with here. The binding constraint is at home. The response to this, year after year, is the promise to implement QuickBooks^[2], a package used by small businesses globally, deployable by any competent partner in weeks, which the Council has been promising across more than one budget cycle and still has not deployed.

A council that collects G$2.35 billion and cannot deploy accounting software is signalling where its priorities sit. An unreliable ledger protects delinquent ratepayers, lets officials selectively enforce, and shields political patrons from audit trail. The people who lose are the ratepayers who do pay and the contractors who do not get paid (ahem, solid waste contractors).

Turn to the revenue projection. The document frames 2025 collections at October to show a 42.8 percent collection rate on Rates and Taxes, ignoring the full-year 2025 outturn of 52.5 percent that was available months before the budget was tabled. Against the actual base of G$1.409 billion, the 2026 projection of G$3.066 billion requires collection to rise by 117 percent in a single year. The forecast had to be inflated for a reason, and it is visible in the ratios. The 2026 budget plans employment cost of G$1.734 billion against projected revenue of G$4.412 billion, a 39.3 percent ratio that looks responsible.

Apply the 2025 actual revenue base and the ratio becomes nearly 74 percent before overheads, returning to the mid-80s once overheads are added, which is where the Council just lived through 2025 (and really, all the years since this council was sworn in). The 117 percent revenue increase is backfilled to cover a payroll the Council cannot otherwise afford. What was offered from the floor in defence of that number was fantasy. “Abracadabra” would have served the same function and taken up less space on the page.

Examine what the Council did with its money last year. Capital Expenses came in at zero against a budget of G$762 million. Operating Cost overran by 177 percent, a G$284 million breach of authorisation. Maintenance was budgeted at G$652 million and executed at G$76 million, an 88 percent underspend. And yet page 2 asserts that the Public Health, Markets, and Solid Waste Departments performed satisfactorily. One cannot perform satisfactorily on 53 percent of budgeted outflows when nearly four-fifths of the collection went to payroll before any service was delivered.

The budget just passed raises Human Resource expenditure by 87 percent, against a 2025 pattern in which the Council could not spend the employment budget it had. It raises Solid Waste by 73 percent, pooled under two lines with no contractor register disclosed. It creates a Mayor’s Office line of G$400.6 million with no 2025 comparator. It cuts Cemetery spending by 45.8 percent as the narrative declares a cemetery land-exhaustion emergency. It cuts Roads and Stone Depot by 30 percent while complaining on page 12 that the city’s roads are in disrepair. A budget that funds the opposite of what its own narrative says is urgent is not an accident. It is a set of choices.

The ratepayers of Georgetown now carry a budget whose narrative contradicts its own line items and which quite loudly declines to reconcile against the prior year’s actual outturn. It arrives a third of the way through the year it is meant to govern. It rests on a ledger the Council has admitted is broken and has declined for years to fix. The questions it ducked can still be answered. I will keep asking them. If the answers turn out to be “abracadabra” after all, at least the document will finally be consistent.

References

1. Georgetown Mayor and City Council, Regent Street and Avenue of the Republic, Georgetown (2026) — www.govserv.org ↩
2. QuickBooks Training in Georgetown — www.theknowledgeacademy.com ↩