-City Engineers say

WITH the City Engineer’s Department understaffed, sluice attendants attached to the Georgetown Mayor and City Council work seven days per week without getting a day off and are not always paid their overtime on time, resulting in absenteeism and other challenges regarding the operation of the pumps.

This is according to City Engineer Colvern Venture, who spoke at an end-of-year press conference held on Friday at City Hall, where he outlined several of the issues and constraints facing his department.

“The sluice attendants work seven days a week; there’s no day off for them. So because they are working seven days a week, it would entail them working overtime. Many times when they receive their pay, they do not get their overtime. The staff complain they don’t have the finance to come to work every day after they clear all of their home expenses and other bills that they have,” Venture revealed.

“So that results in many [sic] absenteeism, many times especially in the evenings we have a lot of absenteeism. We’ve seen a little improvement from the last time that the President [Dr Irfaan Ali] would have [sic] visited. The council has been working to reduce that challenge of persons not receiving their overtime when they are supposed to receive it,” he added.

According to Venture, the overtime issue is oftentimes due to the finance problem facing City Hall.
“It might be that the council could not address the overtime at the time, reaching the monies to pay the overtime on the statutory date for pay day. So you release the basic [pay] and then you work towards paying the overtime in the next pay. This many times in [sic] the case,” he said.

The situation of the attendants working the entire week without day offs [sic] has been ongoing for some years now and is due to a lack of replacements when persons quit the job or retire. Venture said that while the sluices need a full complement of 43 staff to ensure the everyone gets days off, there are only 33 persons currently working in the sluice section.

In some cases, staff would have to be moved from other departments to give priority to the sluice attendant staffing. This situation affects work in the sections from where staff had to be moved.

“Those persons that we have out there are a mixture of staff. We had to take off from the section of drainage to fill vacancies of persons who left the job or retired because the council did not employ persons, and we are still short. The drainage section was reduced to 11… to have persons working on the sluice because that is very important and we take that as a priority that there must be staff,” he said.

According to Venture, a lack of gear has also been an issue for the staff.
“Some persons complain that they did not receive the necessary protective gear, raincoats and so on. We wrote for those things but they still have not received them as yet,” he noted.

Most of the pumps around the city are manned by three attendants, who work in three shifts: 06:00hrs to 14:00hrs, 14:00hrs to 22:00hrs and 22:00hrs to 06:00hrs.

Management of the city’s waterfront sluices which control the inflow and outflow of water is considered critical, given the flooding situation that occurs whenever there is heavy rainfall. With above-normal rainfall in the past year, management of the sluices have become a focal point. As such, supervision of the sluice attendants is considered important to ensure that they do not slack up on the job. In June, during an impromptu inspection by President Ali, several attendants were found sleeping and being negligent.

Venture said his department is working to ensure that all of the sluices are being manned as is required throughout the day. He expressed gratitude to several government ministries, which he says has been assisting the situation.

“The staff that we have, the engineers are on the ground monitoring the waterfront to ensure that they are coming to work on time and are there to open the sluices. We are getting the help to man what we can. When we can’t, the Ministry of Agriculture, they are always willing to give a helping hand to us. The Ministry of Public Works and Ministry of Local Government, also from time to time give us assistance,” he noted.