Parliament resumes its 2019 budget debate today, practically halfway through the year. There are several reasons for its tardiness, not in the least the continued effects of Hurricane Irma on revenues as well as expenditures.
That’s also why St. Maarten is being allowed its third consecutive deficit, in contravention of the Kingdom Law Financial Supervision agreed on when the Netherlands Antilles was dismantled per 10-10-10 and its five-billion-guilder national debt largely taken over by the Dutch government, for Curaçao and St. Maarten to become autonomous countries within the kingdom. But the Committee for Financial Supervision CFT did require a reduction of the total 2019 budget amount from NAf. 514 million to NAf. 478.8 million.
According to the most recent news, approval for an increase to NAf. 483.8 million was still being sought mid-May. Hopefully that hurdle has now been cleared.
Revenues were estimated at NAf. 401.1 million plus an extra NAf. 10.5 million. However, the latter was to come from income-generating measures still to be decided on that will obviously have an impact only for the last six months of 2019.
The deficit of around NAf. 70 million would be covered with liquidity support from the Netherlands – as was the case for 2017 and 2018. Certain conditions have now been attached, including Members of Parliament taking a 10 per cent pay cut as the Council of Ministers had done earlier.
While that did not sit well with several elected representatives on either side of the aisle, the reality is that their salaries are considerably higher than those of counterparts in the three other kingdom countries – the Netherlands, Curaçao and Aruba.
Financial assistance from The Hague is still badly needed, so there seem to be little choice in this case but to swallow the proverbial bitter pill.
