LLG looking at cutting costs

THE Lae Urban local level government (LULLG) needs to reduce its costs and that includes retrenching some employees, Mayor James Khay says.
Khay said the workforce’s productivity had been an issue in the previous administration and the LLG was K20 million in debt.
He outlined that the areas that contributed to debts incurred were housing rentals (K700,000), car hires (K7 million), service providers (K10 million)
Khay said the rest of the costs were for wages and other areas.
“In my previous term as mayor, I only had 280 employees and these were people employed by LULLG on merit,” he said.
“We do not just handpick anybody we like without first assessing their qualification and experience to the positions.” Khay alleged that in the previous administrations, there were more than 600 employees and some of them were not productive but still on payroll.
“These are the people that the LULLG will look at retrenching to cut down on the number of employees and costs,” he said.
Khay said the LULLG also needed a control mechanism to verify the many issues that it was facing, especially at the administration level.
He said with the huge debt incurred, they needed to control spending in some areas and apply cost-cutting measures.
“At the moment, I don’t know who is doing what at the LULLG.”
Khay said after the retrenchment the positions would be advertised to rebuild its capacity.
He said Lae needed a temporary city manager to help manage the authority’s operations.
“I understand that the candidates have been shortlisted and are under screening process but that will take a lot of time and we need someone right now to run the office.”