Vexed Bermoothes

The following questions were submitted by the Opposition for written answer on Friday, February 19.  The rumour is that Government considers this information to be secret (and their secrets have a distressing tendency to end up as investigations by the police or auditor, à la BHC, Stonington, etc.)

• The names and address of all those firms that submitted proposals in response to the Request For Proposal of the Bermuda Government (“RFP”) for the oversight, management and implementation of the integration of the Municipalities into the Government of Bermuda?
• The details of each of the proposals received in response to the RFP, including the projected and/or estimated costs of each proposal?
• The details of the accepted proposal of the successful bidder, Attride-Stirling & Wolonecki and McKenna Long & Aldridge, including the services they propose to provide, the total number of estimated hours to complete the RFP Project and the applicable hourly rate or rates?

Parliamentary questions are supposed to be answered, not swept under the carpet if they are embarrassing.  $800,000 has been budgeted by the central government to launch the opening salvos in its war on the local government – one that will become increasingly  messy and divisive.

How can Parliament exercise its duty to oversee the public purse when legitimate questions such as these are ignored?

How can you be serious about PATI (public access to information) yet turn down information requests whose “disclosure is in the public interest” (as the draft Bermuda law floated last year allowed for commercial information)?

The whole “city takeover” thing stinks of hidden agendas … and undermining parliamentary practice like this just deepens the suspicions.  Does the PLP have that much political capital left to spend?