City Hall owes garbage collectors hundreds of million of dollars

Aug 19, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor,
One of the main reasons that City Hall is always broke for years now is because it took on an ill-advised and expensive option of contracting out most of its services to private individuals and companies instead of doing the jobs themselves as they did in the past.
The Council now has garbage collection, weeding, road sweeping, the provision and maintenance of public conveniences, provision of guard services, the cleaning of canals and drains, repairs and maintenance of roads etc. done by private contractors while the Council employees provided these services themselves in the past at a much cheaper rate. But much worse than that is the fact that they still maintain the same staff strength as they had when they provided the services of approximately eight hundred employees. This means there is massive redundancy and duplication at City Hall.
How could they justify in this modern digital age, after farming out most of their services to private companies, maintaining such a huge employee count and a massive payroll amount each month? They need to make a choice, and that is either maintain the private contractors at a prohibitive cost and get rid of half of their employees, or get rid of the contractors, save hundreds of millions of dollars each month and have the employees recommence doing the work themselves. It is not rocket science nor is it inventing the wheel; the council used to do it in the past when Georgetown was a ‘Garden City’ and the pride of the Caribbean and they could do it again. It is just that the ‘Big Wigs’ would not get any kickbacks from the contractors. Just imagine we currently owe the two garbage contractors a whopping quarter of a billion dollars?
James Mc Onnell

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