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Council must ensure contractors, agencies adhere to city bylaws – PM Phillips
Kaieteur News – The Georgetown Mayor and City Council (M&CC) is being urged to use its authority to ensure that contractors and agencies involved in building construction within the city adhere to the city bylaws.
This comes even as officials of the Georgetown council complained about the regular flouting of the city bylaws by ignoring the need for engaging the City Engineer’s Department before embarking construction projects within the city.
From left: Mayor Ubraj Narine, Deputy Mayor, Alfred Mentore and Prime Minister, Mark Phillips, engaged in discussion about the city bylaws.
Mayor of Georgetown, Ubraj Narine, and a team from the Georgetown M&CC have since engaged Prime Minister, Mark Phillips, on the matter.
During a recent discussion with the Prime Minister, the Municipality was encouraged to use whatever authority it has to force contractors and agencies to comply with the city bylaws.
The remarks were made by the Mayor and Deputy Mayor Alfred Mentore, who bemoaned the construction of drains and revetment work without consultation with the City Engineer’s department.
During the discussion, the Deputy Mayor revealed the officers of the Council are faced with a predicament in this regard.
He said that there are instances when the Council makes its decisions but its members are called directly by state officials on behalf of well-connected persons and ordered to act counter to those decisions.
Mentore said that the matter is made worse by the Local Government Commission (LGC) when it fails to act on the decisions of the Council to discipline officers who act contrary to the regulations.
In his remarks, Mayor Narine highlighted the work on Vlissingen Road next to the Guyana Defence Force Base – an area that he says has technical challenges due to the pump station being located nearby.
Narine explained that the drains being constructed are narrower than what existed, and no consultation was done with the Council on the construction.
The Mayor also highlighted the work being done on Camp Street in front of GRA which has already shown signs of compromising the surrounding drains.
The Mayor stated that the Council is not anti-development but promotes collaboration to ensure all stakeholders are involved to avoid unnecessary inconveniences to the citizens of Georgetown.
Last January, Mayor Narine pointed to the need for new building codes in the city.
Back then, the City Mayor noted that need for improved building codes in the city has been a point of discussion for some time now, however, with massive development already ongoing and even greater development on the horizon, the issue is taking on new importance.
The current building codes are considered wantonly insufficient in giving the M&CC authority to properly mandate and enforce the proper measures in the construction of buildings.
“It can be rectified if we work on it right now; we can rectify it before it gets worst. It will help us because a lot of major buildings going up, construction is happening and a lot of the investors are here. We can have a round table discussion to come to some kind of consensus,” he said.
Added to this, the Mayor recently noted that the Central Housing and Planning Authority indicated that it depends on the City Engineer’s department to approve plans before making its decisions and encouraged the engineer department to ensure that all plans satisfy the Municipal requirements before forwarding them to the CH&PA.
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