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UNDER THE CANOPY

Oct 14, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Any businessman knows that your clients are your number one priority. You look after your clients and then you take care of all the other free riders. This is the law of success in business as it is in government.
The dilemma that City Hall faces is that it is on the one hand claiming to be interested in stamping out illegal vending, but on the other hand it is trying to facilitate vending. City Hall, so long as it adopts the position that it is obligated to facilitate vending, will find itself in confusion as to what to do.
For years, the Georgetown municipality has allowed a monster to grow. It cannot control, any longer, that monster. And so what it is doing is chopping off the feet and the legs of the monster in the hope that it can bring some sort of control to its movement. The monster, however, is not going away. It is here to stay, and therefore, it has arrived at a point in which its actions are increasingly becoming contradictory.
City Hall cleared the Stabroek Square of vendors who had been vending their wares there for years. The Square however is now being used not as a place where people can walk freely and meet and assemble. It is now a large parking lot.
Criminal elements have returned, and recently it was said that a gun was found under the canopy. This has led to a suggestion that vendors under the canopy of the market should be removed. Some of these vendors have been there for thirty years. Where are they going to be placed?
As a matter of strict policy, no vending should ever have been allowed outside of markets. The markets are part of the city. They have popularized the city.
The vendors inside the markets are not doing any significant business, because there are just as many people selling outside the markets than inside. City Hall has therefore been for decades destroying its markets by allowing vending, including illegal vending, to be on the rise outside of the markets.
Why would anyone go to shop inside of the markets when they can get everything they want outside? The stalls inside the markets have been in state of business decline for decades while vendors outside are doing far better.
This situation needs to be reversed. Those who are paying rentals for stalls inside the market should be enjoying higher sales. They cannot, because right now the sales are being monopolized outside of the market. This is unfair to be legitimate of City Hall within the markets.
At some markets there is a greens section. But the greens section is becoming like a deserted town. No one is going there to shop, because the vendors are being allowed to vend on the side of the road, which not only shortchanges the vendors in the greens section who are paying rentals to City Hall, but they are not doing any business at all.
City Hall is now indicating that it will consider relocating bus and car parks, and that the vendors will be part of this process, meaning that vendors may be relocated near to where the new bus and car parks are to be situated.
It means that we are going back to a disordered town. There is indeed a need to relocate bus and car parks, but why allow vending areas to develop around these new locations?
The solution to all of this is for City Hall to simply discourage all illegal vending. It should also not be granting any permission for persons to vend on the pavements and on the side of the road.
There is no need, also, for City Hall to find places for vendors. There is a greater obligation for City Hall to support its markets and to try to encourage more people to shop within these markets, because this is where the City earns a great deal of its revenues.

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