ALL HANDS are required on deck for rescuing Georgetown, our once proud capital city, from the utter disgrace, the shameful, stinking place to which it has deteriorated under the watch of what passes for a Mayor and City Council.

The time for useless talk has long passed. Mayor Hamilton Green has long ran out of sterile excuses and blame-shifting rhetoric.

Indeed, for all his known political expertise in government and long experience in the affairs of the Georgetown Municipality, he is now being viewed as irrelevant to what’s required for even minimum administrative leadership.

The government, which remains the largest taxpayer to the Council, has been most generous in the financial interventions it has been repeatedly making; “billions of dollars,” according to President Bharrat Jagdeo, while Mayor Green engages in excuses and blame others.

So, President Jagdeo has decided to bite the proverbial bullet by his announcement on Friday, the holding of an emergency meeting yesterday with the City Council — minus Mayor Green — to consider the creation of an Interim Management Committee (IMC).

That meeting was scheduled to take place as this Editorial was being written, and its outcome will also be published as part of our today’s edition.

However, even without knowing of the outcome, readers may recall that the President’s move for an IMC was an idea he felt compelled to voice back in June 2007, when the government released $40 million in special assistance in that year when Guyana was preparing to host Cricket World Cup.

Of course, the concept and practice of an IMC for administering the affairs of the City Council had preceded Guyana’s hosting of the World Cup.

What, however, is urgently required is that while the long, disappointing wait continues for new local government elections, is to know of the positive responses that the private sector and labour movement may have to offer in relation to the President’s call for a temporary IMC to save Georgetown from being buried under the obscenity of spreading, rotten, sickening garbage.

The General-Secretary of the Guyana Labour Union, Carvil Duncan, is already on record for denouncing the poor administration of the City Council that has so often affected the workers who have had to be rescued by government financial interventions.

There are more than sufficient skills and expertise located in the private sector, labour unions and other stakeholder organisations to identify with the initiative for an IMC for at least a reasonable period, pending local government elections. They do not, as President Jagdeo had stated on Friday, have to be political representatives.

We await the new developments to flow out of yesterday’s emergency meeting to discuss the creation of the IMC.