Municipal state of affairs of City of Georgetown

Dear Editor,
Having a municipal market in an urban locale is the most exhilarating thing to any city. It is a place where you can go to make your purchases of items such as fresh fruits, vegetables, fish and poultry. In fact, it is a place where you can buy practically anything.
In some jurisdictions around the world, there are 24-hour markets where customers can shop in the ambience of modernity and come away satisfied.
Contrast that to a rat-infested, foul-smelling, health hazardous place called Stabroek Market, and it makes you sick to the stomach. The Stabroek Market is a public eyesore and a health hazard all in one. A quick summary of what obtains is that it is a rat-infested, dilapidated, smelly structure where vagrants and other unsavory characters lurk. It is a place where more of the vendors are on the outside, blocking the free flow of traffic. It is all happening right outside Stabroek, or Big Market.
Now, the primary objective of the ruling PNC-controlled City Council is to make the city so deplorable that Central Government would be embarrassed to the point of giving in to their demands for more subvention. As one PNC commentator stressed, “Central Government needs to spend more for the city, because the oil dollars are here man, spend de money.”
Just blindly toss more money into the coffers of City Hall, with no accountability from them.
Isn’t this one of the reasons why developing states like ours are never able to see the light of development? Isn’t this one of the reasons why an entire country is left to rot in poverty, even though wealth abounds? These are pointed questions that City Hall needs to face up to. For a municipality that has from time immemorial been under the “control” of the PNC, what have we to be proud of?
Wild, wasteful spending of state funds without any stewardship of those finances being accounted for would ultimately lead to the ruin of any society. It’s the simple fact!
On the other hand, wise, responsible spending which comes from careful planning and the execution of those plans can and will bring the desired results. What has to be done is: the mayor and the APNU-dominated Council must dethrone themselves from the backward politics of “us and them”, and get down to purposeful city planning and development. The City Council must work with the Government, and not the other way around. Their plans – or lack thereof – for decades have brought us to this super-embarrassing place that we are in, and it is high time to come into the fresh air of modern development.
And this is not too difficult a task to accomplish. For starters, the entire block beginning at the Cornill Street old GNCB Bank coming to Big Market itself must be developed into a mega-market shopping complex. Build a two-storey structure, so that it will accommodate the vendors encumbering the streets. I am positively sure engineers from the City can work along with those of the Ministry of Local Government to change things around and bring Georgetown into a beautiful modern city.
No finances should be forthcoming until the GCC become civil and work with Central Government.

Respectfully,
Neil Adams