City Hall loses overseas investor for cemetery

May 20, 2009 News

City Hall has lost a prospective overseas-based investor who was expected to help with the restoration of the Le Repentir Cemetery.
Deputy Mayor Robert Williams said, yesterday, that the Barbados investor had expressed interest in the cemetery and had brought with him a detailed proposal for the facility. However following a visit to the Le Repentir site, Williams said that the investor had a change of heart.
“We took him on a visit to the cemetery and on his return he asked ‘When was the next flight out of Guyana?’ His only comments before he left was ‘give me a new piece of land and let me construct a cemetery with everything you are talking about,’” Williams disclosed.
According to the Deputy Mayor, the investor indicated that he was not touching the cemetery and did not recommend that anybody else take on the task.
Williams related that the investor’s interest was spurred when the municipality about a year ago decided to advertise in the newspaper for expressions of interest to restore and maintain the cemetery.
This move, Williams said, came as a result of a sub-Committee, headed by Councillor Ranwell Jordan, that met for about four months with funeral parlour owners, citizens and representatives of some interested organisations to discuss the way forward.
“They came up with some proposals that we should expose parts of the cemetery for investment and development,” Williams said.
According to him, “Inquiries were received and discussions began. We were at the point of settling on plans for the mortuary and the holding room which we had constructed when it was felt by some councillors that we should make the process more transparent and go back again and advertise for interested parties.”
The subsequent advertisements attracted the Barbadian investor who as a result inquired in relation to the construction of a crematorium.

The overgrown Le Repentir Cemetery

And the plans were moving apace as the Deputy Mayor had informed this newspaper that measures were being put in place to garner the involvement of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Central Public Health Medical Board which must first approve the proposals before they could be implemented.
Williams had expressed optimism that the requirements for the crematorium be met in order to pave the way for its urgent implementation.
However, those plans were dashed after the investor visited the site and dubbed it unacceptable to work with.
The Deputy Mayor also speculated that other proposals for the cemetery which were engaged by a Committee headed by THAG Tourist Association which should have seen the cemetery benefiting from some $25 M overseas funding had halted because of the deplorable state.
Williams yesterday noted that the municipality now has changed its focus and is confident that citizens could help to transform the cemetery to an acceptable state.
According to him, by exposing the facility to investment and development of the cemetery it is expected that local persons would be directly involved in the rehabilitation and management of the mortuary which can carry with it a chapel and a new holding room since the old one has been vandalised.
And as part of the plans to improve the cemetery, Williams said that efforts will have to be made to improve the quality of tombs that are being built.
“I can tell you if you put a match box on top of some of those tombs they will cave in. Some tombs have not been properly constructed and we have to take the blame because the law requires that tombs be built of a certain design and of a certain quality.
“It is our officers who are to ensure that whoever is building a tomb use a special type of concrete block and in a special way.”
According to Williams it has been observed that tombs are merely a mixture of sand and a bit of cement thus they cave in when people have to walk on top of them to reach burial sites, a situation which must also be addressed.