THE Mayor and City Council (M&CC)’s two main garbage contractors will soon resume their services to Georgetown, but not with the kind of “luxuries” that they previously enjoyed, Solid Waste Director, Walter Narine has said.

On the sidelines of the statutory meeting at City Hall on Monday, Narine told the Guyana Chronicle that the M&CC anticipates paying the contractors, Puran Brothers Disposal Services and Cevons Waste Management, a $10M per month going forward, as opposed to the approximately $45M that the municipality had been paying monthly.

He offered that the contractors, who are expected to come back on board before Christmas, will no longer clear the markets. “Both of them are coming back but not with the same luxuries that they had before.” “We will take back the markets from them and we are going to do high-producing areas like commercial, Albouystown, Charlestown. These are the areas that produce the most garbage which results in great costs to the city, Narine explained.

In the meantime, the municipality is finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with their collection schedule in certain areas, some of which have not been cleared for two weeks. City Councillors recently voted in favour of a motion moved by Mayor Patricia Chase-Green, to ask the Central Government for more than $400M to bail the municipality out of its debt to the two contractors. Town Clerk Royston King subsequently wrote to Communities Minister Ronald Bulkan seeking exactly $475,635,245 that will be used to pay the outstanding balances which date back to 2015.

The contractors suspended their services since last August because the City Council was not keeping its side of the bargain to pay current amounts. The companies had agreed to wait for what was owing to them for 2015 and 2016.

The Council then hired three small-time contractors to work along with trucks belonging to the M&CC.  Minister Bulkan told the Guyana Chronicle that M&CC’s request would have been taken to Cabinet. Calls to him for an update on the matter went unanswered on Monday.

The motion said the request was in keeping with the municipality’s efforts to honour its responsibility to local communities and to the city as a whole, to prevent the spread of diseases associated with poor municipal waste management and to secure the integrity of the environment and the public health of the city. Also, that in 2015, in anticipation of the nation’s Jubilee celebrations, the Council had embarked upon a massive clean-up campaign in all local communities and had exhausted all of its available funds in the massive clean-up campaign.