THE Georgetown Mayor and City Council on Wednesday approved the amended parking meter by-laws by a majority vote. Thirteen councillors voted in favour of the amended parking meter by-laws while two voted against and two abstained from voting.

The by-laws are to be posted up at several public buildings across Georgetown for 14 days for viewing by citizens before being sent to Minister of Communities Ronald Bulkan for approval and published in the Official Gazette. Before it is sent to the minister, citizens will be afforded an opportunity to review and give feedback on the amended parking meter by-laws.

PPP Councillors Bisham Kuppen and Khane Sharma voted against the by-laws, while Councillors Malcolm Ferreira and Carlyle Goring abstained. Kuppen and Sharma argued that the by-laws were in support of a contract that still remains unfair to citizens.

“The fact of the matter is that we are attempting to pass or approve bylaws for a contract that has yet not being proven to come about in a legal manner, so there were indications made that this was approved by the previous council but there is no evidence that has been produced so far to prove that and the fact of the matter is that due diligence was being conducted after the fact, when in fact it should have occurred before that contract,” said Kuppen.

At the special meeting held on Wednesday, several councillors were absent but City Mayor Patricia Chase-Green allotted two minutes speaking time for those who opted to speak on the matter. Four councillors, A Partnership for National Unity’s Heston Bostwick and Team Unity’s Malcom Ferreira along with Sharma and Kuppen,-spoke for the allotted two minutes on the subject of the amended by-laws.

Ferreira called on councillors to await the ruling of the High Court before going ahead with the amended by-laws however, Mayor Green asserted that the contract was binding and could not be wished away.

Ferreira said, “We should not rush into any decisions and more so decisions that have proven to be unpopular and some of those decisions even had the government to intervene to protect citizens,” he told fellow councillors.

The legality of the agreement between City Hall and Smart City Solutions, the company that was contracted for the parking meters project has been the subject of court action. Last December, the High Court quashed the parking meter by-laws which will bar the council from proceeding with the project.

The council has since appealed the decision. The court action was filed by the New Building Society in February, 2017. The bank had challenged the legality of the parking meter by-laws that had been approved by Local Government Minister, Ronald Bulkan.
High Court Judge, Naresh Harnanan scrapped the legal validity of Bulkan’s decision to approve the parking meter by-laws. The judge found that the procedure to bring the by-laws into force was breached.

Meanwhile, earlier this year it was announced that following discussions with Smart City Solutions, citizens would be required to pay a proposed fee $150 per hour (VAT inclusive) or $800 (VAT inclusive) for eight hours of parking in the city. The new parking fee was proposed by the Parking Meter Renegotiation Committee – a sub-committee of the Georgetown Mayor and City Council – after extensive renegotiation with Smart City Solutions.

The significant drop in the fee from a high of $500 per hour was among agreements reached with Smart City Solutions – a foreign company – based on recommendations proposed by a Special Committee and approved by the Council. The change in parking meter fees is as a result of several protests. Those protests had even resulted in the government suspending the parking meter by-laws, No 1 of 2017, which allowed for a metered parking system in Georgetown.