City administration: Revenue dips as town staff busy with dengue

Consumed by special campaigns, towns fall behind on collection targets.

LAHORE:

The nine town municipal administrations have fallen behind on their revenue targets for this financial year, as staff have been busy dealing with dengue and other non-routine matters, said town officials.

“It has been a really hectic start to the [fiscal] year, especially with the dengue outbreak” said a town municipal officer (TMO). “Everything else has been shelved, especially revenue generation.”

First, there was Ramazan, a traditionally busy month for town officials when they have to set up special bazaars and monitor prices at them. Then came the dengue outbreak, for which town officials have been conducting inspections at tyre shops and go-downs, spraying insecticide, arranging walks and seminars, and taking parliamentarians on photo-op tours with spray guns.

They also had to handle a cattle eviction campaign and anti-encroachment drives.

As a result, the staff’s tax collection and approval of construction functions have slowed. In Ravi Town, for example, there has been no board tax collection in the first three months of this fiscal year, while the target for the year is Rs2 million. Town staff have collected Rs400,000 in licence fees on trades but will have to step up the rate of collection to reach the annual target of Rs3 million. They have collected only Rs700,000 in building approval fees, against the yearly target of Rs10 million.

“Ramazan and the dengue outbreak badly disrupted our schedule,” said the town’s finance officer.

Other town revenue officers told a similar story, saying they had achieved only 6 to 15 percent of their revenue targets for the year, with a quarter of it already gone.

The Gulberg TMA is closest to achieving its targets, having collected Rs1.75 million for building plan approvals (Rs7 million target for the year); Rs440,000 in board tax (Rs6 million target); Rs2.73 million in licence fees on traders (target Rs7 million); and Rs15 million in tax on the transfer of immovable property (target Rs60 million).

A TMO said that staff were spread very thin. “We can’t even check the roads we have cleared to make sure the encroachers don’t come back,” he said.

He said that the TMAs paid staff salaries and for development work from funds they generated through taxes and licence fees etc. “When the TMAs fall short we are the ones who will be held responsible,” he added.

Another TMO said that he and his workers had gained some relief from dengue duties recently when the Health Department hired additional staff. “I was not able to go home and slept in the TMA office for three weeks,” he said.

“We had to submit separate reports to the chief secretary, health secretary and district coordination officer on a daily basis. Parliamentarians were using us for their clean-up campaigns, which turned out to be more like election campaigns. We had to guide them, attend meetings and follow their orders, or there was the threat of dismissal,” he said.

Allama Iqbal Town TMO Muhammad Arif said that routine work had been disrupted because of the extraordinary measures taken in response to the dengue outbreak, but he was confident that the TMAs would get back on track. He said that development works had been delayed by heavy monsoon rains and then dengue.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 13^th, 2011.