Our once bustling city centre has become a ghost town thanks to the Mayor and City Council (M&CC). Had they done any surveys to find out whose cars were parked on the city streets, they would have discovered that many of them belonged to the employees of the banks, insurance companies, offices and shops in Georgetown’s downtown area.
Georgetown grew up from a colonial port that was convenient for its location at the mouth of the Demerara River – and long before there was any vehicular traffic – to being a busy capital city. How much planning was done along the way to accommodate projected growth appears minimal and building codes in recent years seem to have become meaningless.
The parking meters, if you listen to the Mayor and the Councillors who support this travesty, would magically create order out of the chaos that has been indulged for decades.
There is the distinct feeling that the Municipality counted up all those lovely vehicles parked on the city streets and rubbed their hands with glee at the millions they were going to rake in from a parking meter contract that seems addled in corruption. They thought they had the people cornered. Well, the people have pushed back.
Some are now being dropped off at work or at shops. Some are parking on streets not metered and some are walking. (We might have a fitter nation out of all this.) Some have parked their vehicles at home and are using bicycles and motorbikes to get around the city.
The protest is about the secret SCS contract itself, the outrageous parking fees, and about the arrogant manner in which the programme was foisted on the public.
City employees used the streets to park because most businesses do not have space to provide in-house parking. Their employees simply cannot now afford to pay upwards of $30,000 each month to park their vehicle. Even if reduced by half, this would still be burdensome.
In other countries where parking meters are used in certain downtown areas, most businesses provide free parking spaces for their employees. Banks, shops and supermarkets are also required by planning regulations to provide free parking for their customers.
This maintains order on the roadways, since many vehicles are parked away from any main thoroughfare. But the naked aggression used to break a bridge to a designated, off-road parking area for Teleperformance employees shows that the M&CC are not really interested in bringing order to the city’s streets.
If that was the case, they would encourage and support every business entity willing to find ways to provide similar employee parking. However, M&CC’s Teleperformance performance revealed that the main, or sole objective of their parking meter scheme is to rake in money. And for whom?
The Town Clerk, in his public pleas to the citizenry, assures us that the monies are needed to improve the Municipality’s services. He fails to acknowledge a basic human trait: people will not be fooled all the time.
The citizens of Georgetown are not only fed up of the M&CC’s inability to provide any proper services to keep the environment clean, tidy and healthy, but they are unconvinced that monies collected by the Municipality are being used prudently and in the city’s best interests.
Garbage collectors are never paid on time; drains and gutters continue to be clogged; canals are silted up and overgrown with bush; alleyways are left uncleaned; and the M&CC still fails to understand the simple concept of maintenance.
The Municipality always claims bankruptcy and the citizens are in the dark as to why. The M&CC would help their case tremendously if they welcomed a forensic audit of the Municipality’s accounts which would include a close look at the SCS parking meter contract and a list of those who have defaulted over the years on paying their rates and taxes.
Areas of weakness in their fiscal management could be identified and corrected, and the city’s business community might even partner with the Municipality to maintain vital services if the M&CC shows that they are genuinely cash-strapped.
However, the Municipality’s resistance to every request and effort to have an audit conducted – a resistance supported by the otherwise audit-happy PNC-led Government – only heightens suspicions that the citizenry’s monies are being misspent, misused and, perhaps, even personally pocketed.
For the M&CC to expect Georgetown citizens to simply trust them with millions, when they refuse to account for the millions that have been collected over the years is simply disingenuous. It’s time to park the meters and have a forensic audit of the Municipality’s books.
