Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) President Chandradat Chintamani has told Stabroek Business that the position of the Chamber is that the business sector should help to ease the crisis presently confronting the Georgetown City Council by moving to settle its outstanding rates and taxes obligations.

In an invited comment during an interview earlier this week Chintamani said that while the municipality was facing “other problems” that particular issue of its current financial crisis and its diminished ability to discharge its obligations to the city was one that had particular implications for defaulting ratepayers including those in the commercial sector.

Earlier this week it was disclosed that not for the first time the municipality was unable to  meet its salary obligations to municipal employees for the month of August or to settle substantial arrears to private contractors responsible for garbage collection. Chintamani said that he had, in the past, had discussions with City Mayor Hamilton Green about the challenges facing the Council and that as President of the GCCI he was “committed” to advocating that businesses discharge their payment obligations.

“We really cannot point fingers at the municipality in circumstances where we ourselves are significantly in default. Of course the municipality has problems but then we in the private sector have obligations.

Meanwhile, the GCCI President told Stabroek Business that the limitations of the City Council cannot be separated altogether from the continued practice of indiscriminate garbage disposal by some traders in the city. “That is a matter which the Chamber wishes to have its members and the commercial sector as a whole focus on.” Chintamani said.

In recent weeks the spate of urban shopping that preceded the start of the new school year has seen a profusion of deposits of discarded paper, cardboard and plastic wrappings in drains and on parapets. While some traders in the commercial area have conceded culpability over the recent profusion of garbage, an employee of a downtown shoe store told this newspaper that she believed that “garbage is a City Council problem.” However, Chintamani told Stabroek Business that he felt that the responsibility of businesses in the commercial sector as far as the cleanliness of the city is concerned ought to go far beyond “their expectations of the City Council.” He said he believed that businesses ought to take personal responsibility for their own external space and that that responsibility “is a personal commitment that has to do with the image of the company rather than with the obligations of the municipality.”