By Jeff Trotman
The Clean Up My Country programme was poorly executed in Linden says Chairman of the Linden IMC, Orrin Gordon.
According to him, Georgetown has a greater population than Linden and while Linden is the second most populous town in the country, it is physically the largest with 65 square miles but the Ministry of Local Government continually treats Linden “with scant regard”. He added that the council does not know how much money was allocated for the exercise in Linden and Region Ten.
He said although the Linden Town Council has decommissioned the dump site on the west bank of Linden since it is close to the Dakoura Creek, which is earmarked to be the sole source of potable water on that side of the river, the Ministry of Local Government dumped the solid waste it collected on the programme at Dakoura instead of the current dump site at Kara Kara on the east bank, which is about five acres in size. According to him, the Ministry of Local Government prepared a hole and claimed that it dumped 262 loads of material, “which is equivalent to three months of garbage”.
“So, imagine, they are saying to us that they dumped three months of garbage in an area that can’t take three months of garbage because almost every month we had to go there and clear that place. So, I knew right away that something was wrong in the whole process,” Gordon said.
He, however, acknowledged that quite a lot of stuff was dumped to the extent that garbage overflowed onto the haul road used by trucks to take bauxite ore from the Dakoura Mine. “You go there now, flies on the haul road. So, they’ve messed up the entire situation,” Gordon said, adding that the stuff was dumped at Dakoura because the programme planners do not live in Linden and do not care about the possible environmental hazard might have been created.
Background
Gordon said the town council met with Local Government Minister Norman Whittaker in July 2014 to sort out the municipality’s budget “whereby there was a shortage of some 30-odd million dollars and the minister was asked to do certain things (or) Cabinet should make a decision on subsidy so that we could get the budget balanced.”
According to Gordon, the Minister was of a different mind and among other things, talked about the $9M that was spent on the Mackenzie market and “he included the clean up my country programme, saying that would help the council in a big way in terms of its solid waste management”.
Gordon said officials from the Ministry of Local Government met with some members of the Linden IMC in January at Linden and indicated that the clean up my country programme in Linden would last for one day, hiring twenty five persons at $4000 per person.
“We knew that was not possible,” Gordon said. “Subsequently, they came back and said that they were extending some more days and at that stage two councillors raised objections and concerns and the officials from the Ministry promised to get back to the Council on the matter.
“We then found out that the programme was going to be unrolled in the community and when I saw the programme, I realized that it was extremely deficient,” Gordon said. According to him, preliminary visits should have been made to the various wards of the town to determine the extent of the clean up required in the respective wards and the time it would take to clean up those areas. He said that he decided to conduct such a preliminary survey in Amelia’s Ward and he identified “about thirty hot spots”, which would take about two days to clean up. Noting that his survey did not give consideration to householders putting out solid waste such as old refrigerators, etc., Gordon said that he passed his findings to the town clerk with a suggestion of how the clean up should be tackled. He also suggested that similar surveys should be done in the other wards because such a systematic approach would give a clearer picture of the number of persons and the type of equipment that would be need for the exercise.
Stating that the Ministry started the project on Wednesday, 28th January, the same day that the town council held its statutory meeting for that month, Gordon said the standing orders were suspended to discuss how the exercise was being conducted in the town and Region.
He said he “was brought under the coals by the councillors”, who felt that he had an idea of what the Ministry had intended to do and he should have called a caucus on the matter. Opining that the organizers of the programme “were basically sidelining the Council”, Gordon said he knew that had they not taken the Council’s advice “the programme would not roll out the way it should have rolled out”.
Unsatisfactory
Gordon said on the day the clean up exercise started the Linden Town Council sent a resolution to Minister Whittaker for the programme to be stopped and the Minister responded with a letter in which he claimed that councillors wanted contracts and he was not giving contracts to any councillor. He also said the Minister’s letter accused councillors of playing politics.
The clean up exercise lasted for a week but Gordon insists that the planners should have followed the Council’s suggestion of having the communities involved in planning the programme in terms of the amount of people and the required time to complete the clean up in the respective areas. He is adamant that there could have been more efficient use of trucks in terms of time and size by gathering up the solid waste before calling the trucks to move them away.
“You shouldn’t hire a ten ton truck, or a fifteen ton truck to fetch plastic and paper and bottles,” he said. “If you’re fetching sand … then I accept that you’ll hire such a truck.”
