70% of problems at City Hall could have been directly addressed by Mayor Green
– and his Opposition dominated City Council

WE have all heard and read the many excuses for the current state of the Capital City from the Chief Citizen and Opposition councillors at the M&CC but what we have not heard is that these very people who seek to deflect any blame have always had the power to effectively address issues which affect the people of Georgetown.

This is obviously contrary to what Mayor Green and his acolytes would have us believe, especially since they never miss an opportunity to lay blame at the doorsteps of the PPP/C Government.

An article appearing in the Stabroek News in January 2010, which focused on the 2009 Commission of Inquiry report into the operations of the Mayor and City Council of Georgetown, was very revealing. In a Council

where the GGG and PNC/R together holds a combined 22 seat majority advantage over the PPP/C’s 8, the report revealed that “Burrowes narrows down the crisis in the municipality to the inability of the Council to have consensus in circumstances where the nature of the organisation renders consensus absolutely necessary. This has led to their failure to deal specifically with the problems at hand since the system has become clouded by political issues.”

What this alludes to is the fact that the Opposition even though they have had an absolute majority over the PPP/C in the Council, with freedom to push through and pass their plans and resolutions, and follow up on implementation, they have been busy fighting amongst themselves and not focusing on the people’s business. Previous Old Kai columns have established instances where Mayor Green, prior to returning into the fold of the PNC/R, had blamed them for undermining him, thus hindering efforts to improve the City and, where his own councillors revolted against him, referring to him as a ‘dictator’.

The Council under Green’s leadership has long been the place where one goes to settle personal scores rather than dealing with the urgent business of addressing the ills plaguing the Capital City.

The travesty here is being told that 70% of our problems in Georgetown could have been directly addressed by Mayor Green and his allies by the most simplest of means, all it took was political will and an earnest commitment to the people of Georgetown.

The Stabroek News report had quoted Burrowes as revealing that “What (he) found during the investigation is that the external factors that account for the inefficiencies of the Council amount to no more than 30%. About 70% of the factors that inhibit their efficiency are due to issues over which they have control.”

It is here that Mayor Green’s favorite mantra that the PPP/C Government is starving the M&CC of resources and hindering their initiatives of increased revenue generation unravels. We are informed by Stabroek News that in support of his contention, Burrowes cites the fact that the Council has apparently failed to recognise and exploit the revenue stream that can be accessed if the Council can move to regularise existing disparities in rate payments, “I am positive that a number of properties that ought to attract commercial rates are still attracting residential rates. I have recommended to the Council that they conduct an exercise to determine the extent of the discrepancy and to remedy it. If they go to the courts they can get a listing of all the businesses that were registered, perhaps over the past 2 years. If they acquire that listing they can actually focus on regularising the payment of the proper rates. The next step would be to do a property revaluation of the rates with the assistance of the valuation department of the Ministry of Finance. I am confident that these two separate exercises can result in at least a 30 to 40% increase in revenue stream.”

You would think that barring their inability to come up with such a plan in the first instance, the Councillors would have rushed to ensure that such a plan was implemented in the cash strapped Municipality after the Burrowes report.

A Kaieteur News report in January of this year focused on the non-implementation of the recommendations of the Burrowes report and amazingly, the Mayor of Georgetown was reported as explaining that the Municipality consists of an administration or political directorate and once “we the political directorate accept the content, philosophy of a report or recommendation, there’s not much else we can do; it is now left in every society, to the bureaucracy to implement those decisions.”

This statement underlines the level of concern by the leadership of the M&CC for the citizens of Georgetown. Something this significant was apparently not even worth a discussion, crafting of strategies to tackle, follow up meetings, progress reports, etc., as is expected from those elected to office to manage the ‘bureaucracy’.

But even if we were to believe the Mayor, that their only responsibility on the Council was simply to approve the report and leave it for the staff to implement and further, that he was apparently powerless in the process to follow up and ensure adherence; this impression is clearly out of sync with the one he gave in a Stabroek News article in August, 2010.

The article focused on the then Minister of Local Government, Kellawan Lall encouraging the Council to use a $40 million transfer from Central Government to the M&CC to pay garbage disposal contractors at a time when they were threatening to withhold their services because the Municipality had owed them millions.

The Stabroek News report noted that “While Mayor Green admitted that collectors needed to be paid he had said he will see to it that the council is prudent in disposing of the funds as it sees fit and not as dictated.”

Therefore, if Mayor Green admitted here that he and his allies in the Council apparently had the power and influence to dictate how the ‘Bureaucracy’ at the M&CC expends resources; how is it possible that he claims to be impotent when it came to having them implement the Burrowes recommendations which would have improved transparency, accountability and significantly increased the revenue generating streams of the Council, while at the same time improving the services provided to citizens in Georgetown?