Latest update December 4th, 2024 2:40 AM
The “Fantastic Four” are out to victimize city businesses
Dear Editor,
The greed, the incompetence and the graft of the Mayor and Councillors of the City of Georgetown is becoming more evident and more unbearable with each passing day. On the heels of the egregious parking meter scam, the ‘Fantastic Four’ have now come up with a new and equally devious racket; this time it is the introduction of an additional fee to businesses for the collection and disposal of their garbage.
It is quite interesting to note that it is this very private sector group that effectively protested against the parking meter project that is being targeted by the Council for the imposition of another hardship measure. This would not only be double taxation and illegal, but would be spiteful and unscrupulous.
Business owners ought to remind the Council that since 1998, they were made to pay a whopping 250% rate of the assessed value of their properties whilst residential property owners were made to pay 40%. Their justification given at the time for this steep increase was that it was necessary to cover the cost of collecting and disposing of commercial waste.
How then can they come again and say that they need another fee to collect the same waste that the 250% tax on business was created for? It means that businesses will have to pay twice to have their refuse collected. The Council cannot be allowed to eat their cake and still have it. To make it even worse just at the beginning of this year the City Council nonchalantly hiked property rates by 10% along with receiving the container tax. This is an anti-business municipality.
The remedy to this purported cash crunch that is affecting the way Council manages Solid Waste is very simple and could be figured out by any kindergarten child, and that is to go back to what it did most effectively in the past and what many other cities do, and that is to provide the refuse collection and disposal service themselves rather than contract it out. Doing it themselves would cost a fraction, and would remove the conditions for backhanders and grease.
Anu Bihari
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