CITY councillors have voted to extend the contracts of smaller garbage contractors until March month-end even as Solid Waste Management Director, Walter Narine, urged them to enter renegotiation with the city’s main collectors.

Puran Brothers Disposal Services and Cevons Waste Management Inc. opted to pull their services late last year, when the City Council racked up more than six months of outstanding balances.

Since then, the City Council hired a number of smaller contractors, and re-hired the two main ones to cover works on a smaller scale.
Deputy Mayor, Alfred Mentore, at Monday’s statutory meeting, pointed out that the fact remains that it is the City Council that owes the contractors.

“It’s a breach on our part. We are the ones who caused this dilemma,” he said.
Councillor Gregory Fraser advised that the two main contractors be re-engaged, owing to the fact that the City Council was first in breach. He said business persons will understand what it means to continue working without being paid.

Mayor Ubraj Narine suggested that the smaller contractors be allowed to continue working until March 15, so that the council can speak again on the matter when it meets for the next statutory meeting on March 11.

When the matter was put to a vote, a majority of councillors voted in favour of a motion to have the smaller contractors continue to work until the end of March.
Meanwhile, the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) has written the Attorney General’s Office in its quest to obtain a second opinion regarding the pull-out by the two main garbage contractors.

A response has not yet been received. The first advice received from Lawyer Roger Yearwood was that the contractors – Puran Brothers Disposal Services and Cevons Waste Management Inc. – breached their contracts with the M&CC by opting to pull their services from the city last November.

Accordingly, the contractors could have instead opted to take the municipality to court instead of withdrawing their services. Both contractors had said that it was not a case where they wanted to stop working, but that their current financial positions did not permit them to continue without pay.
Company representatives had said that they were frustrated by the M&CC’s inability to make timely payments.

“We are at a close breaking point… we had a meeting with the City Council and they promised to meet again to discuss payments, but it is annoying and frustrating, it is a consistent cycle,” Cevons stated.

The contractors opted to pull their services in August 2017, when the City Council had racked up more than $400M in debt to the two companies. Although the companies had agreed to wait for payments for the years 2015 and 2016, the municipality was not even keeping up with its current balances for 2017.

Government stepped in and paid the contractors all of the outstanding balances and even went further to create a special arrangement to cover services up to the end of that year.
During that time, the contractors had anticipated that the City Council would have made an effort to contact them on a new system beginning 2018. However, the identical situation repeated itself in 2018.