Dear Editor,

IN spite of all of the ‘trash talk’ (no pun intended) by the Mayor and Councillors of the City of Georgetown about picking up the city’s waste themselves and the disgraceful display of egotism by the Town Clerk who declared the termination of the contracts of the two main garbage contractors in response to the withdrawal of their services for non-payment for two years now, everyone in the city with the exception of the folks at City Hall, knows that it would not be too long before our City Fathers and Mothers will have to go crawling back cap in hand to those two contractors and beg them to return to work.
Already, garbage is piling up in the city as the Council and their new found small contractors lack the means to replace the two main contractors. Visits to major refuse points around the city reveals that the skip bins and other facilities that are being serviced by the Council and these new contractors belong to the two major contractors, which if taken away by those two companies would create further calamity around the markets and beyond.
Who is City Hall fooling? They have a couple of half dead trucks and tractor/trailers that can barely be kept on the road. The three small garbage contractors are hardly any better with trucks ‘As old as Methuselah’ that drive around polluting the atmosphere. One wonders how they were able to beat the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) restriction on the importation of vehicles eight (8) years and older (from the date of manufacture to the date of importation), which took effect on May 1, 2016.
The City Council is one broke, broken institution that is good for nothing but big talk, pie in the sky dreams and molesting citizens for more and more taxes. It is time. It is time they wake up and get real. They don’t have the resources to clean the city, so they should call the two contractors and pay them off, they should dispatch their nearly one thousand workers, many of whom sit in offices all day long doing nothing but powdering their noses, with push carts to comb each street in the city and remove all of the garbage. It would no doubt be a long trek to the landfill site by the workers on foot.
Regards
Modi Sankar