The decision to designate the Stabroek Market Square a parking area for dozens of minibuses plying several city routes has sent the volume of sales by Stabroek Market stallholders plummeting by at least 30 per cent over the past few weeks, according to the Stabroek Stallholders Association.
“What we now have is rapidly sinking revenue for stallholders in the market resulting from the decision to allocate the sole parking space available to customers and delivery vehicles to the mini buses.” President of the Stabroek Market Stallholders Association Harold Dhanraj told Stabroek Business.
And several stallholders with whom Stabroek Business spoke earlier this week say they are outraged over the arbitrariness with which the area which has traditionally been available for their own vehicles and for customer parking has now been handed over to the minibuses. “It leaves you to wonder whether the authorities really care about small businesses,” one vendor told this newspaper.
When Stabroek Business visited the Stabroek Market last Wednesday the customary throngs of customers were nowhere in sight and stallholders were keen to share what they said was their concern that unless the decision to site the mini bus park on the Square was reversed, trade by jewellers, pharmacies, butchers and wholesale and retail merchants in the market could be further affected.
Butchers with whom Stabroek Business spoke said that sales have fallen by as much as 25 per cent over the past four weeks since, according to one butcher, “not too many people are interested in buying meat in this market anymore.”
One wholesaler who told Stabroek Business that retailers come from as far as Linden to make purchases from him said that he fears that some of his regular customers may have already transferred their loyalties elsewhere.
Some of the more irate stallholders told Stabroek Business that they felt that the new mini bus parking arrangements amounted to a further squeeze on the small business sector. “We already have the VAT burden and this could close some of us down altogether,” she said.
Another wholesale operator told Stabroek Business that since the introduction of the new minibus park he had lost virtually all of his wholesale customers and now had to be content with retail orders. He explained that the absence of customer parking in the vicinity of the market meant that it was no longer feasible for persons making large purchases for retail outlets to purchase from him.
Meanwhile, some stallholders are expressing concern over the implications of the tarmac park for the delivery of goods to the market. This newspaper understands that some distributors are already saying that they may stop doing deliveries since the movement of goods from trucks to the stalls inside the market had become a logistical nightmare.
The siting of the mini buses in the market square is the latest twist in what has been a protracted and, until now, unsuccessful effort on the part of the government, the municipality and the Police Traffic Department to bring a measure of order to the area between Avenue of the Republic and the Stabroek Market. Two earlier episodes in the ongoing saga were a court order that required the removal of the minibus park situated at the junction of Croal Street and Avenue of the Republic and the signing of a management contract between City Hall and a private contractor for the running of a vehicle park in the area of the market.
Government took issue with the municipality over the decision to ‘privatize’ parking in the area on the grounds that there had been no prior consultation and earlier this week Town Clerk Beulah Williams conceded that while the Council has acted both out of concern for its revenue base and in order to bring a measure of order to parking arrangements in the area, it had, indeed, failed to consult with “the other stakeholders.” Since then the paid parking arrangement had to be set aside, and Williams said that Council now had to make a decision on how to handle what is still a contractual arrangement with the private service provider.
The collapse of the private parking arrangement seems likely to threaten the already slim revenue base of the municipality though Williams told Stabroek Business that City Hall had received assurances from Local Government Minister Kellawan Lall that mechanisms will be put in place to protect the Council’s revenue base.
Stabroek Business has been reliably informed that City Mayor Hamilton Green and Works Minister Robeson Benn have disagreed over the siting of the new mini bus park and that the Mayor may still be seeking ways of reclaiming the Stabroek tarmac for the Stabroek stallholders. When Stabroek Business spoke with the Town Clerk on the issue, Williams, took a somewhat more conciliatory line in what appears to be yet another spat between government and the Council pointing out that Council now is seeking to provide limited parking space behind the Stabroek Market for stallholder and customer parking.
The current spat over parking space in the vicinity of the Stabroek Market raises once again the issue of the commercial demands on the limited space available in the city. Williams told Stabroek Business that while the question of the city limits was a valid one she did not think that the current problem was insurmountable.
Meanwhile, Dhanraj, the proprietor of Bacchus Drug Store, said that while the Association had already met with the Works Minister no resolution had as yet been put on the table. Dhanraj told Stabroek Business that Stabroek Market stallholders continued to be willing to pay for the use of the car park in the absence of which, he said, “we will almost certainly see a drastic decline in the volume of business” at the Stabroek Market.
