The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) said it has joined with all Guyanese in rejecting the “selfish and anti-
Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo
people measure by a few hard-nosed, hard-ears bureaucrats at City Council” to have parking meters installed in Georgetown. The Party said the plan must be shelved and be left to “rest in peace.”
The party’s General Secretary Clement Rohee said on Monday that the Council has been totally dismissive of the outright rejection by the overwhelming majority of citizens of Georgetown, and their representative organisations as well as members of City Council.
He said some members of the Council have become enthralled by the magic of the parking meter as a means of making money at the expense of citizens of Georgetown.
Rohee said that his party has also noted the total lack of transparency in the public bidding and tendering process of the choice of vendor of the parking meters: “The process is dripping with suspicion. More so, since the address of the head office of the vendor in Manhattan is non-existent, this smacks of the trail of the vanishing vendor.”
The party, he told the news conference, objects to the $500 per hour parking fee and finds that an 08:00 to
Clement Rohee
16:00 hours Monday to Friday employee, who owns a car and works in the city, will have to foot a $4000 per day or $80,000 per month parking bill.
“The PPP finds this unacceptable and it must be rejected by all right-minded Guyanese.”
According to him, the Granger administration cannot escape responsibility for this “catastrophic debacle” on the part of their “satraps ensconced at City Hall.”
Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo said the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance for Change Government is being hypocritical in all of this, as it is now crying foul at the City Council, when it has been doing the very same thing.
“The parking meter issue is another fiasco sanctioned by this government… the city council has hand-picked a few contractors, given them work with no bills of quantity, prepared no public tendering process… how can they then lecture the City Council on lack of transparency, when they have been doing the same thing,” he told Guyana Times Monday.
He said the government, while in opposition, campaigned on the grounds that the PPP/C lacked transparency in its actions and that it was corrupt.
“They promised to do a better job and what we are seeing is a systematic violation of all of our tendering procedures and all the tenets of good governance,” Jagdeo said.
