THE patience of the Implementation Committee for improving the efficiency of the Georgetown Mayor and City Council (M&CC) is fast wearing thin. As such, the Committee will, by midweek, be presenting to its principals, the Ministry of Local Government, several recommendations for reorganising the City Council encompassing strategic priority setting, communications and public education, enforcement and debt collection.
This is according to Chairman of the Implementation Committee, Mr Keith Burrowes, who explained that the recommendations will provide the City Council with clearly defined guidelines for those operations and processes critical to the delivery of services.
He warned also that once those recommendations are approved, staffers who fail to operate along the prescribed guidelines will be sent home. “We have reached a stage in the City Council where we cannot continue to carry deadweight,” he stressed.
Burrowes made the disclosures during a meeting with City Councillors, heads and deputy heads of the Council’s Departments, the Deputy Mayor (Ag) and the Town Clerk (Ag), during which the poor performance of the Council was the main item on the agenda.
He also briefed them on the intentions of the Implementation Committee with respect to driving efficiency and effectiveness of the M&CC, in keeping with the recommendations of the Commission of Enquiry.
Commenting on identification of strategic priorities for the Council, Burrowes disclosed that the Implementation Committee is currently carrying out a risk assessment which will identify the critical areas of delivery of services, and some amount of reshuffling of staff can be expected so that these priorities are effectively addressed.
“What will happen in the very near future is that this risk assessment will show the areas of service that will need urgent attention; areas where we need to concentrate our resources.”
Senior staffers of the M&CC are involved in the risk assessment, which is scheduled to end by mid-week.
Burrowes said the priorities of the council include garbage collection, enhancing revenue collection, enhancing taxes, debt recovery and drainage.
“No more procrastinating; we now have to deal practically with these issues,” he said.
He said that proposals for the approval of the Minister of Local Government will include the necessity for staffers to be transferred either temporarily or permanently to these critical areas of service.
“Those are the things we have to work on now. Even if we have to move some people from one Department and their annual leave may have to be rescheduled, that is not important now. What is important is that we have to deal with the issues affecting the performance of the Council, and get on top of them and stay on top of them.”
He also identified lack of communication between the Departments of the M&CC as a critical problem.
“The Departments are operating in isolation. The Departments have to relate,” he said, adding that this problem will be explored and ranked on the list of risks facing the efficient operation of the Council.
Burrowes said the Council had grown accustomed to operating in a certain way, which had become a form of culture.
“A big issue is changing this culture. The culture of lack of professionalism, lack of personal accountability, has to be changed if recommendations are to be effectively implemented,” he said.
During the meeting, he acknowledged that the City Council alone should not be blamed for the garbage situation in the City.
“The problem is so bad that sometimes minutes after the Council cleans up an area and moves on, the area is again filled with garbage.”
He identified some businessmen who use vagrants to dump garbage, and citizens who do not pay their rates and taxes as additional contributory factors.
He said that other plans to be implemented will include strategic use of the Town Constabulary to catch garbage dumpers.
The proposals for garbage dumping will also include the erection of no dumping signs.
He said he knows that people will still dump their garbage under those signs, but added: “At least, when they get caught, they can’t say that they didn’t know.”
Burrowes stressed that debt recovery was a main area of operation, and there was urgent need to establish an effective Debt Recovery Unit.
He said that even if 25% of the rates and taxes targeted were collected, workers will be paid at the end of the month.
The establishment of a uniformed Debt Collection Unit and the updating of data on properties, to ensure that people pay rates and taxes in accordance with the current value of their properties are also to be submitted by the Implementation Committee to the Minister of Local Government for approval.
He said that members of the Unit will be trained, then business people will be notified by letter of the existence of the Unit, before they are actually deployed for debt recovery.
He hopes that the presence of these uniformed persons at a business place or residence may embarrass people into honouring their obligations.
The Implementation Committee is also mulling the establishment of a Quick Response Group, which can detect problems in the delivery of service and take timely action.
This is envisaged to comprise five or six persons who are multi-trained so they know about all the critical areas and can do the surveillance required to detect and deal with these issues before they become major problems.
He stressed that this was a measure that he would recommend very strongly in the ongoing Risk Assessment exercise.
“Once you have risk then you have to have a proper way of responding to those risks.”
Burrowes stressed that the measures that will be taken will be done devoid of personalities and personality issues.
“I don’t want to hear about personalities but about the system, because we will not be able to deal with these issues if we blow personality problems out of proportion.”
He urged staffers of the M&CC to send him suggestions for improving the efficiency of the council, and added that another step to be taken is to invite all members of staff to a general meeting so that they can also have their say about on-the-ground problems and issues, and ways of resolving them for the benefit of the improved performance of the Council.
That meeting is to be held by October latest. The last such general meeting, he was told, was held in 1995.
Burrowes had compiled a report on the state of affairs at the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) some years ago, and had listed several recommendations that he felt would have helped in turning the entity around.
However, one of the members of the committee, Ramon Gaskin, had subsequently reported that the recommendations were not being implemented.
Gaskin found that there was also a great deal of mismanagement of the work of the council as well as financial irregularities by some of its officials.
He is currently the Chairman of the Implementation Committee because the Minister of Local Government has recently assigned him to provide oversight of the M&CC and ensure the recommendations for its improved efficiency are implemented.