City Hall: Past the point of being a liability to the Capital?

Each time that City Hall appears to have plumbed the depths of ineptitude in the course of the discharge (or lack thereof) of its responsibilities to the capital many of us are probably inclined to think that the municipality finally has reached the base of its ineptness or perhaps that it may even be in the process of a long-awaited ascent towards enhanced competence, where, at least, the surprise and shock afforded by its underperformance are both less persistent and less severe and that things can only get better. Each time, City Hall surprises us, plumbing even further depths of absurdity next time around.

The net effect of this phenomenon, ironically, is that City Hall’s convoluted public relations pursuits may actually have worked to its advantage by removing any element of surprise or shock whenever we are confronted with the latest of its ridiculous ‘gems.’ There is no longer any sense of public outrage; each ridiculous extreme has now come to be dismissed as simply a matter of City Hall being City Hall.  In that circumstance any further outpouring of public opprobrium becomes simply a waste of effort and time. The more commonplace reaction these days has been more of a philosophical resignation, a response that simply says ‘oh well, there goes City Hall again.’

What had long been established, beyond any reasonable doubt, as a culture of incompetence of the worst kind as reflected in the municipality’s protracted inability to collectively confront and overcome its operational challenges has now come to be taken altogether for granted. Even the utter absurdity of its prolonged inability to provide a half-way reliable urban waste disposal regime, rather than, these days, being considered to be a complete outrage (which, indeed, is what it is) has come to be treated as par for the course, just another commonplace municipal anomaly. It is the same with its shocking failure to meet its millions of dollars in service fees to the capital’s two biggest garbage disposal service providers and then, afterwards, to unilaterally alter their contracts on the grounds that the withdrawal of their services (in the face of protracted non-payment) amounted to breaches of contract.

Two Commissions of Inquiry, both of which pointedly address issues of incompetence among senior personnel, acute service-delivery failings, profound institutional incompetence, corruption and serious accountability shortcomings have, up until now, failed to provoke any corrective response, the absence of what ought, by now, to have been a condition of acute official panic, seemingly reflective of a wider indifference to the far-reaching consequences of the mismanagement of the capital. As an aside, one is inclined to wonder whether the current accelerated advocacy of urban tourism by the state agencies under whose watch that portfolio falls is no more than a pipe dream given what we know to be City Hall’s patent inability to ‘pitch in’ as it surely will be required to do, to help raise Georgetown to a standard that will help it pass what, these days, are the demanding tests set by the international tourism market. That is something to which a great deal of thought will have to be given.

However absurd it may seem – and however the Mayor and Councillors and the municipal Civil Service pretend to the contrary – City Hall has come to be seen, in its present state, as a thoroughly regrettable necessity, a burden that the citizenry must bear until, perhaps, our capital’s back is pushed to the wall and we can endure its excesses no longer. Then, perhaps, a more robust sense of urban militancy might compel a change that excludes the municipality, in its present form, from the equation. 

Until that time comes we must simply endure the quixotic mix of incompetence and pantomime that would have afforded the most side-splitting laughter were its consequences not so destructive to our capital.

 It raises, as well, some searching questions for us in the media – questions like whether we do not, too often, afford the circus that often passes for municipal administration, a far too generous measure of attention, in circumstances where there are more than sufficient alternative issues of national importance that are of much greater news value. Here, the example of City Hall’s most recent pantomime surrounding the allocation of a chauffeur for the new Mayor sticks out like a sore thumb.  Is that, in all honesty, worth of our attention or is it not simply affording City Hall a far too generous measure of unmerited public limelight and an opportunity to shift the focus from its long list of woeful failings? 

What, perhaps, is much more worthy of public  attention, purely because it serves to further underline City Hall’s entrenched absurdity is its recent open and utterly shameless  admission, that last week’s awkward and health-threatening pileup of garbage in parts of the capital, including swathes of the business community, was due, in City Hall’s own words to “a mechanical problem with a tractor/ trailer” – a single tractor/trailer, an excuse that does no more than bespeak its contempt for its service-provision obligations and which, frankly, would have been hilarious if it weren’t so utterly ridiculous.

City Hall, frankly, in all of its unwholesome dimensions, has long passed the point of being a liability to our capital.