…Gov’t demands financial statement from City Hall

TRIPARTITE meetings among the government, City Hall and the Private Sector Commission (PSC) to discuss the implementation of a container fee in the city, have been delayed due to Communities Minister Ronald Bulkan’s request for a financial statement from the City Council.A source told this newspaper on Thursday that Minister Bulkan has assured some officers involved that the delay in convening a meeting was not due to a lack of commitment or resolve on government’s part. Rather, he said he saw the need for a perusal of the financial state of the municipality in order to enable proper decision-making.
Minister Bulkan has reportedly said that such a statement is especially important, given that it is felt that it is revenue-expediency that drove the “vexed” initiatives of the parking meters and the container fees. According to the source, the minister was provided the statement by Georgetown Mayor Patricia Chase-Green, and he has since concluded that the City Council is not in a financial crisis that the public is led to believe.
City Hall has time and again cited the need for the said projects to come on stream in order to provide critical services to citizens. In the case of the container fees, City Hall has said that the money is needed to repair roads which the containers have damaged over the years. City Hall had decided to reduce the container fee from $25,000 to $5,000 following a meeting on August 5 with the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) and the PSC. It was agreed that the reduction would be an interim measure and that the fees would be collected at the various ports and wharves from August 1.
The $25,000 container fee which City Hall had sought to implement attracted much criticism from members of the business community and the PSC. Some businessmen had also resorted to the courts, accusing the City Council of illegally implementing such a fee. The court had ruled in favour of the businessmen.
Meanwhile, some time ago, the mayor had criticised the PSC for being slothful in addressing the cost for the contentious container fees issue, declaring that she was not sure if the delay was a means of stalling the work of City Hall. “Even though we are collecting the $5000 retroactive from August 1, in the interim I don’t want to have an interim of five years. I need to have that interim period completed as early as possible, so that we can move forward with our by-laws as regards container fees,” Chase-Green had told city councillors. Meanwhile, when contacted for a comment on the issue, a source at the PSC, who requested anonymity, told this newspaper that this is not the first time that the mayor has sought to attack the commission.