Citizens dump garbage on the streets
WITH the fortnightly collection of garbage still ongoing, citizens are urged to either keep their waste until the Georgetown municipality collects it, or utilize the services of private persons who are willing to remove it.
Director of the Solid Waste Management Division, Mr. Hubert Urling, said so yesterday at a press conference hosted by Mayor Hamilton Green at City Hall, Regent Street, Georgetown.
After the fortnightly collection was instituted three weeks ago, Urling said the Council is now about to head into the second phase of this exercise. In the first, he said the municipality achieved 50 to 60 percent of what was initially projected.
During last week, City Hall managed to receive assistance from the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development which recruited the services of BK International, Cevons Waste Management and the Private Sector Commission (PSC), among agencies. However, he said the ongoing challenge plaguing the Council is that the regular collection is not in place, hence residents continue to dump garbage on the streets.    According to Urling, the PSC has only made available two of the five trucks that it had promised to lend, and they are not the sort to pick up the garbage effectively, as workers have to manually pile the garbage into the truck without the use of the hydraulic apparatus with which garbage trucks are fitted.
The Council projected in the 2010 budget to acquire a few garbage trucks of its own, and this is still on the cards before year end.
Contracts with garbage collectors have all expired so the municipality is currently looking at advertising for new ones.
Mayor Green expressed appreciation to the PSC as well as to a group of workers from the Ministry of Public Works who carried out an “excellent” job last Sunday in clearing a section of Merriman’s Mall.
Green said Minister of Finance Ashni Singh has always been very responsive to the pleas of the municipality and has promised to look into the payment of government’s taxes for the second and third quarters.