Govt’s non-support for City Hall property revaluation “ends plot”– Jagdeo

Vice President (VP) Bharrat Jagdeo has firmly stated that the Government will not support the Georgetown Mayor and City Council’s (GM&CC) attempts to revalue properties in the city—a move he believes was ‘politically motivated to create public dissatisfaction’.
During his weekly press conference on Thursday, Jagdeo said the plan to reassess property values was a deliberate attempt to increase taxes, ‘knowing that citizens would blame the Government rather than the City Council’.
In fact, he asserted that once the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) exposed the scheme, the Georgetown Mayor Alfred Mentore and his administration had been forced to back down from their revaluation agenda.
“He obviously spoke with his political masters at Congress Place and they told him that since the plot to create dissatisfaction was exposed by the PPP, that we have, we have no choice but to back down now, and there was that plot to do that because when people’s rates go up, they don’t care who runs the city council. They blame the Government for it and we are the Government now. And they were hoping that, that would lead to a massive dissatisfaction in the city,” Jagdeo alleged.

“You’ll recall the same sort of thing they did around local Government elections. A lot of rumours, and I anticipate, in Georgetown, new set of rumours soon as we get closer to the elections. The rumours in Georgetown were that we will raise people’s rates if we won the elections; rates and taxes,” Jagdeo pointed out.
About a week ago, Mayor Mentore declared that despite the PPP/C Government’s non-support for the reevaluate properties in the city, the municipal will move ahead with the plan.
At the time, Mentore stated that the request for the revaluation is aimed at addressing compliance issues and not collecting more rates and taxes.
However, the VP has urged City Council to focus on recovering the billions owed in unpaid taxes, particularly by entities linked to the opposition, which includes more than $6 billion in outstanding taxes for the People’s National Congress Reform (PNC/R) Congress Place Headquarters. The leading Opposition party’s holding company, Maiwak, reportedly owes the city $6.7 billion in taxes.
“They could fund two years of City Council expenditure from just collecting taxes from Congress Place. Congress Place owes $6.8 billion, and they just brushed that under the carpet and now, they’re going after religious organisations, etc. The People’s Progressive Party will not support this,” Jagdeo stressed.