It is now an all too familiar dance: The City of Georgetown employs waste disposal firms to collect the City’s garbage, the City winds up owing enormous sums to these firms, who then switch partners and call on Central Government to join the dance, and after being sufficiently appeased by government payments, these firms return to the welcoming arms of the City Council.
And the saga continues: once again, and at the onset of the holiday season no less than the Mayor and City Council finds itself at odds with Puran Brothers Inc. and Cevons Waste Management Inc. over large sums owed to these two firms. The two companies have withdrawn their services over a total of $160M owed them by the City Council for work done since June, and have, again, asked the government to intervene. Citing apparent unreasonableness and the “astounding delinquency” of the Mayor & City Council, the two firms in a joint statement said, “…we found City Hall to be decidedly lacking in a sense of urgency,” and were seeking “immediate and serious engagement” and a “binding agreement” with City Hall.
One would be hard pressed to consider that after umpteen years, the two firms and City Hall do not have a signed, legally binding agreement for the supply of garbage collection and waste disposal services by those firms to the City of Georgetown. Indeed this particular dilemma has repeated itself so many times over the years that the remedy itself seems certain: the Central Government is sure to intervene to avert a build-up of garbage with the attendant public health risks, and pay down some of the debt, whereupon the two main waste management entities will once more continue to supply their services to the Georgetown Mayor & City Council (M&CC).
In the interim, and as always, the City Council has identified several smaller garbage collection entities to attempt to fill the void created by the withdrawal of the top two waste management firms. This time the City has informed us that these smaller entities are “aware of the situation” and are willing to work on credit – an arrangement which basically describes the concept of “digging a hole to fill a hole,” a modus operandi that the City Managers seem to have honed to a fine art. As always too, citizens of Georgetown become temporarily aware of the existence of a Solid Waste Management Department in the Ministry of Communities which also lends effort to the task of garbage collection in the City during the crisis.
All this might seem as effective damage control if this current scenario was not a recurring dance of mismanagement in waste collection and disposal in the city. The usual excuse of insufficient funds brought about by poor tax collection was good only for the first two debacles according to the three strikes rule, and this has become an annual affair. Each year the City is supposed to prepare a budget which is a planning tool that seeks to ensure that all major activities are funded from cash generation, borrowing or special funding. If a deficit position appears in the budget, then certain programmes may have to be scaled down and the prices at which certain expenditure have been set should be re-examined for a leaner, cleaner operation.
But the spending posture adopted by the City Council has constantly showed a lack of financial planning or financial discipline. It is difficult to countenance a City Council that is asking small garbage collectors to work on credit in a climate of breached agreements and financial uncertainty, but thought nothing to expend some $20M in “celebrations” of Georgetown’s 175th Anniversary, allegedly funded by “friends of the City” from the business sector. When one considers that the City Council had stated in 2016 that it was owed some $20 billion in rates and taxes by the commercial sector, while in 2016 it sued five businesses for $1 billion owed, it does stretch the credibility or rationale of the City to accept $20M in donations from the business sector for the purpose of “celebrating” anything. If any outreach is made by the City Council to “friends” in the business sector, it should more properly be in them using suasion within the sector to increase the level of collection of rates and taxes among business entities. If only 1% of the $16 billion owed is collected as a consequence of this preferred involvement of the “friends of the City,” then the current garbage crisis would not exist.
The collection and disposal of garbage in the city used to be carried out by the City itself in a bygone era, and one wonders at the continuous decline in services that the Georgetown M&CC has imposed on the citizens. There was a time when workers of the City, in addition to collecting garbage, also weeded parapets and cleared drains in a routine execution of the City’s obligations to its citizens, for which it levies rates and taxes. Nowadays, however, citizens have grown used to cleaning their own parapets and drains at their own expense, and many appear to have forgotten that this once was and still is an obligation of the M&CC. The City Council itself seems to have retreated into the municipal markets (which provide a ready and visible cash flow) as the core of its operations. Meanwhile, other important obligations to the city of Georgetown have been farmed out, or neglected by the City managers.
Garbage collection and disposal is a critical necessity in every city, town, village or household, having implications, at worse, for causing public health problems or, at best, for being horrible optics and physical unpleasantness. A permanent solution must urgently be found for the M&CC’s mismanagement of solid waste collection and disposal in the city of Georgetown.
