Disgust for attitudes of the Mayor and Councillors

Dear Editor,
Each and every morning and afternoon that I pass alongside the grand old City Hall building on Avenue of the Republic on the way to and from my office, I am swept over by two distinct emotions, one of profound fear that at any time that rotting edifice may collapse to the ground to the detriment of its occupants and passersby and the other feeling being that of complete disgust for the attitudes of the Mayor and Councillors for the last two decades and more who just sat idly by and allowed this beautiful edifice to deteriorate to the ruinous state that it is currently in, whilst they fiddled.
Most troubling of all is their apparent disposition that the maintenance and upkeep of their own headquarters is none of their business, but rather seem to think that someone else, such as Central Government or even worse, foreign countries and international organisations must divvy up the cash to fix it.
How preposterous! The Georgetown municipality has been collecting billions of dollars in property rates, markets stall rentals, license fees, container taxes etc and rather than spend a blind cent on repairing and maintaining City Hall, has opted instead to squander it on grand trips abroad, on purchasing fancy vehicles, on paying super salaries to its vastly bloated human resource structure, on contracts that do not subscribe to the tender procedures of Guyana and on useless projects such as the Presidential Park in Church Street etc.
Not surprising with their well-known lack of transparency, accountability, and high levels of corruption, their many pitches over the years to have a restoration fund established which they hoped would have attracted donations from civil society, the Private Sector and international agencies have gone nowhere.
The time has come for those at City Hall to stop dreaming of restoring this edifice to its former 19th-century glory with grand plans that cost over $900 million garnering same from other people’s pockets, and instead, get to work fixing it in multiple phases using monies from its own budgets over the next few years in order to preserve our capital’s heritage.

Sincerely,
Kishore Das