Pay your water bill, says minister

As Barbados faces its worst drought in decades, Minister of Water Resources Wilfred Abraham revealed the state-owned water authority was battling its own lack of flowing funds.

He warned that revenue at the Barbados Water Authority was fast drying up as Barbadians failed to pay their bills.

Speaking on Voice of Barbados’ Down to Brass Tacks, Abrahams, addressing complaints about persistent water outages in rural parishes caught in the grip of an ongoing drought, said the state-owned utility has taken a double-digit knock to its already weak finances in recent weeks.

“Our financial position as tenuous as it was has become worse,” he said.

“The reality is that a lot of people are not paying their water bills at this time. So the take for the Barbados Water Authority on the bills has dropped to I think 25 per cent of what it is supposed to be.”

He argued that just as the BWA determined not to disconnect people during the COVID crisis, consumers should not put their bill payments on the back burner.

Abrahams told the programme: “I am just going to ask people to use their conscience a little bit. The fact that we are not going to disconnect you for health reasons does not absolve you from paying your water bill because at the end of the day you are not just going to continue racking up arrears against you but in the interim, you are starving the water authority, or the water authority is being starved of money it needs to do basic things to make the system work properly.”

He warned that the problem went further than BWA, saying the Government was stretched because no money was “coming into the Government’s coffers”.

He declared: “Land tax is not being paid, VAT [Value Added Tax]  is not being paid, business has ground to halt in Barbados, so people are not able to pay their statutory obligations in Barbados. So the Ministry of Finance is catching  itself to even find money to run the country so it just not a good situation for us to be in.”

The Minister responsible for the BWA noted that the authority was almost at the point of getting to the bottom of what he termed “dangerous debt” levels discovered in 2018 but has now suffered a setback and as a result, a number of critical programmes would be on hold.

He cited the proposed $14. 8 million Vineyard project that is expected to provide relief to the water-scarce parishes of St John and St Joseph through the redistribution of water from Vineyard, St Philip to the Golden Ridge/Bowmanston system.

Abrahams: “We were scheduled to be starting all of these things… when the COVID issues descended upon us.  We have the bulk of the pipes for Vineyard project so we had started the process, we have located where we are going to put the reservoir in Stewart Hill, we have specs for everything that needs to be done for it, we were sourcing the financing for it, we were investigating loans, we had people, that we were looking to get the financing from, but the reality now is that with the decreased revenues of the Barbados Water Authority, occasioned by people not paying their water bills we cannot speak to a financier and we cannot prove to them a guaranteed source of income for the next 12 months. Our income now is at its worse for I don’t even know how long.”

Abrahams said the BWA would now have to turn back to the Government to find the money to complete the project, noting that Prime Minister Mia Mottley and Minister of Finance Ryan Straughn have been trying to source funding.
sandydeane@barbadostoday.bb