Last week’s undertaking by Mayor Hamilton Green to exhaust “all avenues” to find a solution to the city council’s never-ending financial dilemma would probably have gone unnoticed among a sizeable portion of city dwellers. The Mayor must by now be aware that such promises are not, these days, taken seriously in circumstances where similar previous undertakings have delivered little but failure and disappointment. People will take only so much disappointment. The loss of public confidence in City Hall and, by extension, in Mr Green’s administration, is now so complete that he may as well save himself the bother of any further promises.
If, however, purely for the sake of argument, we were to take at face value the Mayor’s most recent promise to explore “all avenues” to garner funds to pay the municipality’s ever-mounting debts, one assumes that he would have to look first in the direction of collecting at least part of the considerable sums in rates and taxes owing to City Hall. Here, Mr Green would be going over well-worn ground, the various previous plans unveiled by himself and his Deputy, Mr Robert Williams, to do better at debt collection, having failed to bring the kind of results that might meaningfully alter the city’s distressing financial circumstances. Indeed, when account is taken of the views of the Burrowes Commission of Enquiry regarding the inefficiency of City Hall’s debt-collection system, one wonders whether the previous undertakings given by Messrs Green and Williams were not informed much more by the need to create some semblance of making an effort rather than any real conviction that the promises could be kept.
The other “avenue” open to the Mayor is to enter into yet another exercise of coaxing and cajoling to try to wheedle out of central government some portion of its outstanding rates and taxes. Such an encounter is almost certain to trigger yet another head-to-head between Mayor Green and the political administration which not only wants to see the back of his administration but sometimes appears prepared to watch the city endure a measure of hurt in order to get its way.
In sum, Mayor Green’s administration is caught between the rock of loss of public confidence and the hard place of what appears to be the political spitefulness of a central government that is constantly out to ‘get’ him.
Public loss of confidence in City Hall has become so profound that its ability to discharge even its most basic functions with a modicum of efficiency and consistency is in serious doubt. One need only consider its urban garbage collection regime, punctuated as it is by the periodic stoppages because of outstanding payments. When those interruptions occur, City Hall becomes completely impotent while the citizenry can do no more than endure the stench of the city and the risk of some unmentionable epidemic. Surely, even the Mayor himself must agree that this is no way for us to live and that, in the circumstances, public loss of confidence in his administration is not without good reason.
The Mayor will doubtless argue that blame for the prevailing ineptitude of City Hall cannot justifiably be placed – at least entirely – at his door. The fact is, however, that his seventeen-year tenure has coincided with considerable urban decay. During the period we have witnessed one calumny after another, chiefly overwhelming municipal service-provision shortcomings, incompetence and failure to hold in check an uncontrollable urban lawlessness. This has been characterized by the indiscriminate dumping of garbage by business houses and an ill-concealed contempt for the municipal by-laws that have to do with things like physical construction compromising drainage through the building of illegal structures and myriad other transgressions.
In a sense, Mr Green himself has been part of the problem. His own combative disposition, honed during his years as a PNC high flier, frequently combines with central government’s distaste for his administration to create a combustible condition that flares up intermittently, submerging the interests of the city beneath what becomes a political confrontation. At times like those we come to understand only too well that as long as our capital remains mortgaged to narrow political interests it will probably remain in its retarded state.
What has not helped the Mayor’s cause is the evidence – documented in the Burrowes Commission Report – that his administration is blighted by incompetence, mismanagement, low morale among municipal workers, internal division and corruption. The Mayor himself has been a controversial figure within his own council, more than once surviving attempts to remove him from the mayoral chair. Further, he has remained Mayor only because of circumstances that have long delayed the holding of municipal elections, and his presence on the campaign trail for the 2011 general elections suggests that the former Prime Minister, having now set aside the entity (Good and Green Guyana) through which he secured the office of Mayor, has, once again, re-invented his political self.
That Mayor Green’s regime has failed in its responsibility to the capital is not a matter in question. To the verdict long delivered by the citizenry has been added, more recently, the pronouncements of the Report of the Burrowes Commission. The Report, apart from documenting the failings of the Green mayoral administration also expressed the view that there were functionaries within the municipality who, for various reasons, were simply not fit to hold public office. We had learnt thereafter, that Mr Keith Burrowes was to have worked with City Hall, using his own recommendations to seek to improve and, where necessary revamp entirely, some of the critical systems including those responsible for debt collection, debt management and financial accountability. Such progress as is being made is unclear up to this time.
With municipal elections not now due, it seems, until next year, we would appear to have little choice but to continue to endure the prevailing municipal administration with all the attendant risks, including an even further decline in the state of the capital and possible environmental and health consequences; and even if central government, sections of the business community and those delinquent sections of the citizenry must share the blame for what our capital has become, it is the Mayor and his administration that is ultimately accountable. Mr Green, we assume, is under no illusions that his tenure will be extended beyond the present term and on the basis of his record, one might well argue that the sooner his term of office comes to an end, the better. At the same time, those of us who have witnessed the last decade and more of urban decline would be inclined to the view that the key, perhaps, to enhancing the quality of municipal services to our capital lies in placing control of City Hall in hands that cannot be either tied or manipulated by self-serving political interests.
