The Mayor & City Council is not well parked

Dear Editor,

The Mayor and City Council has not been well parked for decades ‒ certainly before the days (and nights) of APNU+AFC, since whose arrival it has been reduced to a ‘community’ – in disregard of the Municipal and District Councils Act 1969.

The evidence strongly suggests that this piece of legislation needs to be carefully re-examined by all the relevant stakeholders, primarily of course by the fresh eyed councillors, that is, if copies are available.

When persons listen to the strident discourse surrounding one eminently suspect project, the impression gleaned is that the exhortation/advice/instructions being given are not necessarily embedded in organisational compliance with legislation which after nearly fifty years, logically demands revision appropriate to current local and international environments.

This collective disconnection is compounded by the palpable loss of institutional memory – unforgivable in the case of the two main actors, ie, the Mayor and the Town (not City) Clerk.

Both have been associated with the long history of mismanagement which has characterized the oldest municipality in the country, for at least two decades, and which would have included two earlier incumbents of the town clerkship, the last one of whom probably earned the council an unenviable amount of notoriety.

One reason for the undue display of authoritarianism from this particular office is the power which the Act assigns to it, without any provision for discipline to be exercised by a council, which, to all physical appearances outnumbers the single incumbent.

As a consequence, the record shows the overarching influence the Town Clerk (an obvious misnomer) can wield over individual officers in the administration, and the influence that can be exercised in undermining the (voting) pattern in the council, by establishing advantageous relationships with individual members.

There came a time when the incidence of non-accountability became so pronounced that the Auditor General was required to investigate the council’s administrative and financial management. The latter’s report resulted in disciplinary action against personnel, including the termination of services of a very senior officer (who incidentally has been reported in the press as having now been revitalized in one regional administration).

The available records will show that consequent upon the Audit General’s Report, a comprehensive inquiry was launched into the operations of the city council.

The Burrowes Commission Report of three volumes (published in 2009) has been obdurately ignored by those who call themselves ‘stakeholders’. (Perhaps there is too much at stake.)

The commission’s report constitutes an incisive examination and analysis of an unorganized institution, of defective systems and procedures poorly implemented by under-qualified and untrained personnel, who indulged in cronyism in the selection and recruitment process, amongst other things.

Meantime, contrary to the recently published protestation by the incumbent Town Clerk, there was conducted a property evaluation exercise, which developed a structure of rates for each of the six municipalities existing at the time.

It was a competent technologically conducted survey, which was donor funded, and titled the Urban Development Programme which functioned within the purview of the then Valuation Division, now a ‘Programme’ within the Ministry of Finance.

The records of that Urban Development Programme would be archived in that ministry, and should be researched diligently, given the possible importance of the report’s findings.

So that fundamental to what is being debated cannot be measured simply by ‘meters’, but more profoundly it is about the stability of the city council and how well parked its decision-makers are.

Yours faithfully,

Earl John