In a matter of days, the three-month suspension of the Parking Meter By-Laws will come to an end, and from all indications, the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) will be making moves to seek an additional month to continue public consultations it had started on the much-criticised parking meter project.
Mayor Patricia Chase Green told a section of the media recently that a vote was taken by Councillors on Monday to give the Parking Meter Committee an additional month to complete its consultations. The M&CC has indicated that the additional month would also allow the contracted parking meter company, Smart City Solutions Inc (SCSI) to produce several documents, including a socio-economic feasibility study, that would seek to guide further discussions on the issue.
The M&CC had entered into a contract with SCSI on May 13, 2016, for parking meters to be implemented in Georgetown. However, the project came under intense scrutiny and rejection issued from various public and private stakeholders, the Opposition and even some Central Government officials over the clandestine way it was being foisted on the populace, its prohibitive pricing and the contracting company’s general disregard with the way the new mechanism was introduced to the public, among many other concerns.
After the contract became effective in late January 2017, several large protests were staged in front of City Hall calling for it to be revoked, while several stakeholders took the M&CC and the SCSI to court over the matter. And under pressure, on March 21, 2017, the Minister of Communities who had initially passed the By-laws bringing parking meters into effect, ordered that they be suspended for a period of three months to facilitate the re-negotiation of the terms of the contract.
We believe that all of this could have been avoided in the first place had the M&CC approached the issue in a transparent and democratic manner. What the authorities are seeking to do now is what they should have done long before the actual implementation of the project. After all, the introduction of paid parking in the city meant that citizens would have had to dig into their pockets to pay for something they never paid for previously and it would have been good to seek out their views on such an initiative before implementation.
Moving forward, there are several fundamental questions to be resolved and the M&CC should seek to use the little time left in the suspension period to settle them. We had said before that if these fundamental questions were not resolved, the project must be put on hold or scrapped in its entirety. For instance, we had pointed to the numerous problems we found with the project in relation to profitability and profit-sharing. In this project, the main investment inputs are (a) the Georgetown road system; (b) the enforcement of the project; (c) the parking meters; and (d) the accountant. All other ancillary costs are minimal. The Guyana side would be providing the road system which is worth billions of dollars and is by far the overwhelming part of the investment. It also seems to be mainly responsible for the enforcement. In this current business plan, the Guyana side would be contributing 99 per cent of the input costs, while the company would only be contributing about one per cent while collecting 80 per cent of the profits. Certainly, the unfairness of this profit-sharing mechanism needs to be addressed.
We had also called for the feasibility study to be published, as this would help to temper the deep-set assumption that the parking meter project was enveloped in secrecy and corruption.
So far, citizens are not certain as to what will be the next move of the M&CC and the Government as both parties have not been very forthcoming on the matter. There is a perception that nothing meaningful has come out of the suspension period thus far. It would be an effective strategy if the authorities were to provide periodic updates to the general public on what progress is being made especially as it relates to resolving the many contentious issues surrounding the project. A lack of forthrightness will only add confusion and create an environment for suspicion.
