…and will not have to pay millions to contractors
THE Mayor and City Council (M&CC) of Georgetown, having recently paid off its outstanding amounts to garbage contractors, has high hopes of resuming its own garbage collection. The council is hoping for a day to come when the need for hiring garbage contractors will be no more, so that only the council’s resources would be used to address these city needs.
Millions that would have had to be paid to garbage contractors would thus be on hand for other purposes.
Currently, though, all garbage contractors are back on the job following their recent strike, and are working according to their schedules.
Public Relations Officer at M&CC, Royston King, told the Chronicle yesterday that the council continues to do its bit in collecting garbage with its resources, as part of a wider plan to resume its own garbage collection.
The municipality was promised a number of new trucks from the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, and has received two so far. King said they have not yet managed to get the others.
He complained that in spite of the efforts by the council to keep the city clean, a handful of residents is still engaging in illegal dumping at several locations, including King, Wellington and Robb Streets, among many others.
He observed that heaps of garbage re-appear just after municipal workers would have cleaned a particular location.
Recently, the city council benefited from a government subvention that assisted with the financial woes that left workers without salaries and garbage contractors without payment for months.
These financial constraints forced the contractors to withdraw their services, again, in protest, resulting in a pile-up of garbage in various sections of the city.
President Bharrat Jagdeo recently announced that the government will be paying $80M in rates and taxes to the Council; this payment brought government’s rate payments up-to-date to the end of the third quarter this year.
Government will also be injecting a further $120M into the municipality to help meet its outstanding liabilities and to accelerate its efforts to keep the city clean.
A further $15M will be provided by central government to the City Council for cleaning up Le Repentir Cemetery; these payments will see government injecting a total of $215M into the city with immediate effect.
Furthermore, the president also indicated that central government is currently spending in excess of $450M to rehabilitate various roads and streets in the city.