Govt pays $40M rates and taxes

May 14, 2011 News

— garbage contractors ready to resume full operation

After just over a week of garbage collection challenges, the Georgetown Mayor and City Council is set to have things return to normalcy.
This development, according to Acting Public Relations Officer, Debra Lewis, has been made possible through Government’s payment of $40M on Thursday towards its rates and taxes for the first quarter of this year.
Private garbage contractors – Cevon’s Waste Management Services and Puran’s Brothers Waste Disposal Services – had withdrawn their services from the municipality last week for non-payment of a debt which had extended from the latter part of last December.
However, Lewis said yesterday that Council has since been able to pay off in excess of $5M to the contractors for last December.
With Government’s payment, Council is likely to make another payment of $30M to the contractors by Monday. This payment, according to Lewis, will represent payment for January through February.
In light of this development and based on sustained negotiations, Lewis said that the contractors have committed to returning to their regular collecting duty around the city.
The contractors’ withdrawal had sparked much concern among Council officials and citizens from various parts of the city that were affected. Though Council workers were still mandated to pickup waste from facilities such as hospitals and schools, there was evidence of indiscriminate dumping around the city, which the municipality was hoping to guard against by urging residents to either transport their waste to the Haags Bosch site at Eccles, East Bank Demerara, or keep same in plastic bags after dousing the waste with a strong solution of disinfectant.
Earlier this week even the usually vociferous City Mayor Hamilton Green was reluctant to comment on Council’s financial situation and the garbage collection challenges though he was evidently concerned about the state of affairs.
At the start of this week, too, Acting City Treasurer, Andrew Meredith, was mandated to seek every possible area to garner the necessary finances. However even by mid-week there was no positive development.
Green hinted at the possibility of seeking audience with Nigel Dharamlall, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, the Ministry under which the municipality falls.
The municipality was in fact looking to Government since the year commenced to pay-up its rates and taxes for the first quarter of this year in order to address the debt.
At a recent statutory meeting, Mayor Green had revealed that he had tried to make contact with Minister of Finance, Dr Ashni Singh, to no avail, in an attempt to have government pay-up its taxes. He had anticipated that “this will allow some degree of elbow room.”
The dilemma had caused another situation to develop in the form of indiscriminate dumping, a state of affairs the municipality had hoped to guard against by appealing to members of the public to desist from such actions.
Since the announcement of the withdrawal of the services of the contractors, the Council had urged that persons with transportation dispose of their waste at the Haags Bosch landfill site.
“We knew that this would have happened…people are just not using the landfill site and they are taking their waste to the markets. Council workers cannot deal with it. People are bringing old furniture and other waste to the markets instead of going to Haags Bosch.”
In light of the municipality’s financial constraint the contractors had together requested that they be provided with part payment of the outstanding debt. Reports are that the part payment would have enabled them to offset expenses that they have already incurred due to Council’s non-payment.

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