A Cabinet decision in July 2001 which allowed contracts for special employment projects, costing up to $250,000, to be issued without tender was primarily to assist violence-plagued communities controlled by dons, a senior government official admitted yesterday.

“It was really for community projects where you know you have a don man with a gang and guns, where you know if you go down there di man dem will kill you. So what the Cabinet did was to give approval, interim approval, for contracts up to $250,000 for special community-based projects,” the official, who asked not to be named, told the Observer yesterday.

However, since then, the decision has come to be interpreted as meaning contracts for goods, services and works, “which is not what it was intended to mean,” he said, pointing out that the decision has been taken out of context.

He said that most, if not all, of the Cabinet decisions made “prior to the Cabinet approving the procurement guidelines” have been superseded by the guidelines. However, the Cabinet Decision No 28/01 dated July 30, 2001, which authorised the issuing of the special employment contracts, was made some two months after the Ministry of Finance and Planning issued the procurement handbook with the new guidelines in May 2001.

Yesterday, minister of state in the Ministry of Local Government, Harry Douglas, distributed an advisory from Solicitor-General Michael Hylton confirming that the Cabinet decision was in relation to “special employment programmes, drain cleaning and small emergency works falling below the upper limit of $250,000”, and that the contractors can be chosen without the need to go to tender.

The advisory was in response to a query raised by Opposition Leader Bruce Golding in the House of Representatives on November 7, following a statement from minister of local government and environment, Dean Peart, on his ministry’s audit of the St Catherine, St Mary and Westmoreland parish councils.

Golding questioned why the audits had indicted the councils for issuing contracts up to that limit without tender, when the Cabinet had approved the action.

In response, Peart told the House that while the Contractor-General had suggested that all contracts must meet procurement requirements, he realised that the councils would have some difficulty with that policy.

“I thought that was ridiculous,” Peart told the House on November 7. “So I called the Contractor-General and told him that we had to have a figure that they can work in small communities. We arrived at a figure of not $250,000, but $100,000. Parish councils and the ministry agreed on that.”

But Golding said that a Cabinet decision could not be overruled by the minister and the councils.

Yesterday, Contractor-General Greg Christie wrote to radio talk show host Wilmot Perkins explaining that he had never agreed to a limit of $100,000, and added that he was not even aware of the Cabinet decision on the $250,000 figure.

The July 2001 Cabinet decision said that it considered the difficulties faced by central and local government agencies in acting with dispatch in response to emergencies, complaints from communities of limited participation in solving internal problems, difficulty in implementing traditional employment generation programmes in a manner which preserved the original intention, and the further marginalising of unemployed persons in the communities who felt that “wealthy contractors were coming into their communities to do the only work that they were qualified to do”.

The decision stated that, in order to accommodate small contractors who were not capable of participating in a tendering process, the Lift-Up Jamaica concept should be adopted where team leaders were nominated to manage the works.

The National Works Agency was required to establish a schedule of rates to be applied to the special employment programmes, drain cleaning and small emergency works, and the contractor, or team leader, should be selected on the basis of an ability to undertake the works in terms of methodology, access to equipment, materials and staff.

The Cabinet also decided that these interim procedures and guidelines should be applied to the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation and the parish councils as well.