Jagdeo highlights City Hall’s ineptitude to upkeep Georgetown

Even though they were warned, the Georgetown Mayor and City Council (M&CC) paid no heed to the fact that revenue collected through arrears would inevitably be depleted and there will no longer be funds to maintain the cleanup exercise around the capital.

What started off as a dynamic campaign to reclaim the name “The Garden City”, has ground down to zilch as City Hall runs out of money and is now desperately seeking a $600 million bailout from Central Government to offset its debts.
Owing to the M&CC’s ineptitude, Georgetown is decorated with garbage once again and the City is indebted by millions of dollars.

Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo, during a news conference last week, recalled that he had advised that there needs to be a detailed programme in place to ensure there is a revolving fund to continue the beautifying works around the City since the arrears collected will naturally be exhausted.
“The financing of this (cleanup) was done from arrears collection, from money owed to the city which they got through some announced amnesty… I argued: if you are going to use your arrears to clean up the city, what will happen when you can’t collect arrears anymore? Can you sustain it from current revenue?” he reminded, as he lamented the current state of affairs of City Hall.
“Now the city is in a mess again and it will even get worse because they can’t collect the garbage, they have no money to collect the garbage now,” he noted.
The A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) coalition, having campaigned vigorously on the platform of cleaning up the city, prided itself in fulfilling this Manifesto promise.
According to Jagdeo, this was perhaps the only thing the coalition did right, but now the party has proven to be ineffectual in sustaining the fulfilment of this particular promise.
Meanwhile, the Opposition Leader expressed that he supported the cleanup initiative but had concerns with the execution of the campaign. He outlined that the cleanup exercise should have been done transparently, and the public made aware of the source of the money.
“We learned that the city was financing the cleanup but there were no tenders. Based on information we are getting from sources, that about $800 million was spent and that this money was given to contractors who were sympathetic to APNU. There was no public tender…” he pointed out.
Additionally, he said the amnesty initiative which raked in the arrears was not at all transparent.
Notably, Communities Minister Ronald Bulkan indicated that Government will not be granting City Hall a bailout.
“This $600 million bailout that we all have read about in the newspapers, where that particular council is looking for that support, what I can say… and from my own understanding and the limited current engagement that I have had with colleagues in the Administration, is that I do not think that there is any appetite on the part of the Central Government to be favourably disposed towards that request,” Bulkan recently asserted at a forum in Berbice.