Dear Editor,
QUITE laudably, I observed Georgetown’s new Mayor His Worship Pandit Ubraj Narine leading by example in a clean-up operation in an effort to return Georgetown to its Garden City appearance. But citizens by and large would prefer at this stage the cleaning up of the Georgetown municipality, rather than the mere optics of a token clean-up of Georgetown.

With the Mayor and Councillors of the City of Georgetown in a state of complete bankruptcy, His Worship would be well advised to enquire of the administration as to the rationale of maintaining a top- heavy and distended staff structure of almost 1,000 workers, many of whom are friends and relatives of the top brass at City Hall, whilst contracting out almost every service the council provides to the citizenry.

Simply put, the council cannot have their cake and eat it too. Since the beginning of our capital in 1812 to the late 1980s, the Georgetown municipality collected garbage from citizens itself, first using animal-drawn carts all the way up to rear-loading compacting trucks that they owned, they weeded the parapets with cutlasses and hand scythes up to power weeding brush cutters, dug the drains by shovel and then progressed to using modern hydraulic excavators etc, and at the same time balanced their budgets, whilst satisfying the citizenry completely. Since then they have contracted out all of their services, run the municipality into total bankruptcy whilst creating what is now known as the ‘Garbage City.’

The choice is simple: it is either they give about 500 of their employees the pink slip and put them on the breadline, whilst saving tens of millions of dollars each month to bring them back to solvency, which they would hate to do as it would be devastating to the pockets of their kith and kin, or they could fire the contractors and use the humongous savings to purchase weed whackers, excavators, garbage trucks and litter vacuums. This would of course bring a halt to the gravy train.

Outsourcing may seem like a perfect solution for deficit-plagued municipalities, but the morning after can bring some unpleasant surprises and realities. Shifting municipal work to the private sector makes sense only where a company can be shown to provide equal or better service at significantly lower cost to the city. This has certainly not been the case in Georgetown.

Regards
Jermain Johnson