Dear Editor,

THE rather unsympathetic and indifferent response given by the Mayor of Georgetown to reporters regarding the calamity faced by the more than 45 workers from Cevons Waste Management Company who will be fired by September 1, 2017, due to Council’s refusal to pay the company the nearly two hundred million dollars it owes it since 2015, sums up the irresponsibility and ineptitude of those in charge of the Georgetown municipality.

There is scant regard for the welfare of the workers of the two companies, no concern for the well-being of these two companies that have served the citizens of Georgetown with diligence for close to three decades and a complete lack of apprehension for the mounting heaps of garbage appearing all around Georgetown and the subsequent health risks to citizens.

Her glib statement that the situation facing the two disposal companies is unfortunate, but City Hall is financially strapped is dismissive and fails to take into account that if she, her accompanying administrative staff that goes for speech- writing and other personal assistant duties etc, the town clerk and others who travel frequently to South, Central and North America, the Far East and all over the world, would desist from going on these pointless and absurd junkets, then there would be enough money to pay the contractors.

Why does she not consider– rather than having the two garbage contractors lay off close to 100 workers all together who work hard each day and who make a real difference to the city’s environment– to instead lay off 100 of the ‘Big Fish Hotshots’  from City Hall from the nearly 1,000 workers on their payroll, many of whom don’t do anything productive, but who earn super salaries several times that of garbage collectors?

Since the Council is cash-strapped as she claims, why don’t they fire also the other contractors, whom they continue to pay diligently each month due to their kinship with senior political and administrative officials at the Council and who were awarded contracts without adherence to tender procedures?

She speaks as though the Council’s purported financial woes are someone else’s doing and not due to the corruption, incompetence and inanity of the administrators at City Hall.

If she knew that the Council was financially strapped and unable to meet its financial obligations for the work they were doing for the last two years, why did she hire them in the first place? This is akin to writing a rubber cheque to a supplier after collecting his goods. This is something a senior administrative officer at City Hall is well known for doing.

Yours sincerely,

Sean Moniz