– Council seeking second opinion

LAWYERS attached to the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) have advised that that the City’s two main garbage contractors have breached their contracts with the municipality when they decided to pull their services recently.

Outgoing Mayor Patricia Chase-Green made the announcement at the municipality’s final statutory meeting for the year.
According to Chase-Green, the M&CC will be seeking a second opinion to that which was provided by Attorney-at-law Roger Yearwood.

She informed that in the interim, the M&CC will continue to work along with the smaller contractors who will remain on board until January 31, 2018.
The government, though, has entered into an arrangement with the two contractors–Puran Brothers Disposal Services and Cevons Waste Management Inc.–for them to provide services to the City until the end of 2018.

The government has also pledged to pay the contractors all of the monies outstanding by M&CC since June 2018.
It is not clear where the M&CC is going with trying to obtain a second opinion of whether or not the contractors breached their contracts with the municipality. But Chase-Green and a number of councillors were arguing recently that they need to find a different approach going forward in 2019.

Some other councillors, though, sympathised with the contractors and acknowledged that the companies could not continue working without pay.
Chase-Green was complaining that the contractors use the Christmas season every year to hold the City Council at ransom. The contractors have however denied that they deliberately take this stance every Christmas.

Meanwhile, following the latest arrangement by the government and the two contractors, Cevons will provide services for the rest of the year to Georgetown’s Groups Five and Six.
Groups Seven and Nine will be covered by Puran Brothers, which has already placed its compactor back at the Albouystown Market. Cevons has also placed its compactor back at the Bourda Market.

“That help is welcome because the last week of Christmas and the one after Christmas would see a lot more garbage than normal. So that help is most welcome,” Director of Solid Waste, Walter Narine has since expressed.
Both contractors wrote to the M&CC recently, stating that it was not that they wanted to stop working, but that their current financial positions could not permit them to continue to purchase fuel and meet other expenses needed to get the job done.
Representatives of both companies said that they were frustrated by the M&CC’s inability to make timely payments to them.

The contractors were also hoping that since the government stepped in and bailed out the municipality in 2017, M&CC would have made an effort to make payments in a timely fashion and not allow the outstanding balances to pile up.
The contractors had also agreed to move the credit facility in the contracts from 21 to 90 days to allow the City Council more time to pay.

But the contractors now feel that that City Hall took advantage of such a facility and made no effort to pay within the 90 days. The City Council is now seeking legal advice to determine if the contractors breached their contracts.