After many years of mismanagement by a PNC-run Mayor and City Council, which had run the city the way they did the country, with the same results the Interim Management Committee (IMC) was appointed in 1994 and that body left the city clean, with money in the bank.  For the first time in many years the Council’s accounts were on par with a balanced budget and the city once more resembled the “Garden City” of yesteryear.
However, under Mayor Green’s tenure, the Council’s accounts once more went into the red and garbage has again piled up in the city, with the problems accelerating every day, despite massive injections by the Government several times per year.
Immediately upon assuming office the Mayor spent millions to enhance the décor and furnishings in his office, while millions more are intermittently wasted on luxury trips for the Mayor and select members of his staff.
When the Burrowes Commission of Inquiry had completed the findings as directed by its mandate, it had left a comprehensive accounting structure – with the accounts brought up to date for the first time in decades.
During its in-depth and quite comprehensive investigations, the Burrowes Commission had discovered incidence of fraud, with many financial transactions untraceable, with a system of management that could hold no-one to account.  Thus, the Commission’s assignment assumed the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean Stables.
Those who worked with Mr. Keith Burrowes could attest to the fact that he was indefatigable in his efforts to finish the report within the given framework of time.  However, this could only have been done with an ordinary institution.
The City Council is another kettle of very rank fish: And despite the heroic and strenuous efforts of Mr. Burrowes and his staff to obliterate the stench emanating from that Council’s affairs (pun intended), it still reeks.
The Council continuously calls for increased taxes on city residents; but what will they do with the added revenues?  Should city residents be called upon to continually fund the outrageous squandermania of the Mayor and City Council without any returns whatsoever?  What incentive is there for them to pay additional taxes, when the services they receive from that dysfunctional body are almost non-existent?
City dwellers are forever inconvenienced, as one letter-writer noted, with garbage piling up in several places, making for unsightly and unclean streets, with people’s health also put at risk.
Government has once again bailed out the City council – this time to the tune of $215M, while another $450M is being spent on city roads.
Newly-appointed Minister of Local Government, Norman Whittaker, has recently reiterated Government’s commitment to hold elections as early as possible.
However, one is left to wonder if this latest intervention is throwing good money behind bad; because the same administrators will be managing these funds; thus it is an imperative that another mechanism be structured to manage the affairs of the city – probably the Burrowes Interim Management Committee.
If this is not done forthwith, then the taxpayers’ money that is so often squandered by this infamous Council will once more sink into the quicksand of the prevailing lawlessness that hallmarks the operations of the current M&CC and the city’s administrative construct.