| One of the things which may come to the minds of the PG voters on Wednesday is the fact that their town hall was having so much financial difficulties that The Ministry of Local Government had to send in a financial controller to manage their affairs and allow the Town Council to keep functioning.
The mayor maintains that he did the best that he could with the financial resources he had:
Anthony Fuentes, Mayor - Punta Gorda Town
"Finances at the town council during the month of November/December/January/February and so on are very healthy, because we collect our property taxes, trade licenses and so on. But leading on April, May, June and so on it becomes very difficult. Being a municipality where there is less jobs down here, so we have difficulty collecting our property taxes and with that then we have difficulty providing certain services, because the trucks are not new garbage trucks that we have. They were donated to us. The compacter was donated to the Punta Gorda Town Council by Mayor Richard Daly nearly 10 years ago and from time to time it will go bad, work will have to be done on the truck and so because we do not have jobs, people do not come in and pay their property taxes, then the council have difficulty with finances. However, if it was a UDP town council, the government would have bailed out that town council, but because it is a PUP town council, while they want us to look bad in the eyes of the general public and so, they assigned Mr. Hinds from Punta Gorda Town, who is a native of Punta Gorda Town, to be the financial controller and so they have pumped in additional money in Punta Gorda Town Council, of which if I had ask them before Mr. Hinds come here, they wouldn't have provided me with that additional finances."
According to Fuentes, he had to pay off an overdraft facility and a loan which was made by the previous town council.
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