Three laws in one year try to give the communes money

The Constitution of 1987 created councils and assemblies for Haiti’s communal sections, communes and departments, then left their duties and their financing undefined. In 1996 the forty sixth legislature passed three laws to close the gap. The law of 4 April organised the communal sections and required each commune to elect a cartel of three mayors headed by a principal mayor. The second, proposed by the parliamentarian Fils-Aime and published in Le Moniteur on 18 July, created the Fonds de Gestion et Developpement des Collectivites Territoriales, the first and still the only arrangement by which the central government hands money down to local ones. A third law that September set out how the fund would be filled, assigning it shares of the cigarette tax, the customs tax, income tax and the tax on insurance policies. The July law had put an eleven member commission in charge of the fund. An executive decree of 11 January 1999 abolished that commission and moved the money to the Ministry of the Interior, which has no published criteria for spending it.