The Georgetown citizenry dutifully trekked to the polls last March and voted in – or so they thought – a brand new city council. The capricious and inscrutable acting Town Clerk, Ms Carol Sooba, had already long gone, and in her place was the altogether more effusive Mr Royston King, who is not shy about explaining himself to a wary public. But for all of this apparent clean sweep, has anything really changed at City Hall?
Not if one were to read the page 3 headline in our Friday edition, viz, ‘Puran Bros, Cevons threaten to suspend garbage collection again -hundreds of millions owed by City Hall’. If that does not fill the bill for Yogi Berra’s famous quip ‘It’s déjà vu all over again’, then nothing does. Most recently we went through this exercise in August, when we reported the two private garbage disposal contractors as threatening to go on strike because Purans was owed $97 million and Cevons $168 million. At that time the city had contributed $1.2 million to reducing their indebtedness to the first of these contractors, hardly, one would have thought, much of an inducement to persuade them to change their minds.
The Town Clerk’s solution at that time was to remove several areas which were assigned to the private companies and make them the responsibility of the Mayor & City Council. This was not a popular move with citizens who are well served by the contractors and have a less than sanguine experience with the council’s workers. And so it was on this occasion, with complaints from both residents and businesses about the poor quality of the disposal service they were receiving from the city. As a consequence, the commercial district was returned to Puran Bros.
And there the situation remained until now, when the two contractors informed City Hall that they would cease garbage collection on November 14. The reason the municipal authorities have not been paying their debts is the same as it has always been: expenditure far outstrips revenue. On Friday we reported that last month the city spent $161,683,750, which represents more than double its income. “I am saying to you we need new revenue streams,” the Town Clerk told this newspaper in August, in addition to suggesting that in order to pay the garbage disposal companies, the parking meter project was “important.”
We have been down this road several times before under the previous government. In 2009, for example, the city council accumulated a debt of $24 million to the contractors, which seems modest in comparison with what they owe now. However, today the municipality stands in a different relationship to central government than it did under the PPP/C, owing to the recent changes in the local government legislation. In addition, the previous administration was at loggerheads with the then Mayor and City Council, and withheld funds and deliberately precipitated garbage crises in order to discredit the latter.
The citizenry was not fooled by the cynical antics of the PPP/C administration, and laid the blame for the garbage predicament squarely where it belonged – at the door of central government. In fact, the city council could not be blamed for very much at that time, because it had no power to do anything in particular, except pass fanciful budgets and rant and rave around the horseshoe table. As a consequence, it could not be held responsible – or at least, only in a very limited way – for the state of the city.
Times have changed, however. The M&CC is in control, and while still in need of funds, it now receives a guaranteed subvention from the central government, which has little say in the municipality’s affairs. (After the Local Government Commission is put in place, it will have none.) So if we didn’t know before how the city council would have performed had the leaden hand of central government not been pressing down upon it, we certainly know now, especially since some of the same old hands are still entrenched there. Suffice it to say, their performance is a great deal less than impressive.
When the councillors were elected and the various committees were set up, they knew all about the council’s revenue problems, and they knew about the need to pay the garbage disposal contractors, so what plans did they make? It seems, as mentioned above, that Mr King intended to use the parking meter money to pay the private companies, but if so, that was very cavalier of him since there was no guarantee of when that money would come. As it is, the earliest, we are told, the parking meters would come on stream would be mid-December, and they certainly won’t generate the kind of funds necessary to pay the council’s debt to the contractors for some time.
Do the Town Clerk, the Finance Committee and the council as a whole expect Purans and Cevons just to keep collecting in various wards of the city at their own expense? Surely not. So what contingency plans do they have to pay off their debts and prevent the nation’s capital reverting to the state it was in when the PPP/C was in office, with garbage piling up everywhere? If there is one thing this government did right, it was to clean up Georgetown after they came in, and now owing to the incompetence of the municipal authorities we are faced with the prospect of all those millions of dollars and hundreds of man hours going to waste. It is nothing short of scandalous.
What the citizens would like to know is how the council is prioritising its expenditure, and in particular, how it is setting the priorities for spending the subvention received from central government. They would like to be told, for example, how it is that paying the garbage disposal contractors has been placed so low down the municipal to-do list. In this new era of transparency and accountability, residents would like to know a great deal more about exactly how our city is being run and on what our rates and general taxes are going.
In terms of maintaining the city the regular removal of garbage comes top of the list – and do not let us pretend that at this stage the municipality is either organized enough or disciplined enough to manage rubbish collection as efficiently as the private companies. We have a garbage crisis looming, so let the city council through its Finance Committee advise the Town Clerk how expenditure should be rearranged so the contractors can get a debt repayment schedule which they will find acceptable, and which would allow their work to continue after November 14.
This government started life with a clean capital; let the Mayor & City Council not disgrace itself by returning the city to squalor again.
