By Oluatoyin Alleyne
In November 2002 Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon announc-ed that Cabinet had provided “strong support” for a plan to develop Georgetown and among other things was the recommended removal of the prison from the city. Six years down the road it remains just that, a plan.
The plan, named the Greater Georgetown Deve-lopment Plan, was created by Indian Town Planning expert, Professor Akhtar Khan with a sum provided by the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Cooperation.
At the time Khan was working as a consultant with the Central Housing & Planning Authority (CH&PA) and he along with a team came up with an expansive plan on how Georgetown could probably be returned to being the ‘Garden City’. It was expected that the plan would have been implemented between 2001 and 2010 but to date there has been no step in the direction of making the major recommendations a reality and it is suspected that the plan has been shelved.
And while Mayor Hamilton Green is “disturbed and perplexed” that the plan has not been implemented, former Minister of Housing & Water Shaik Baksh, who had once listed the presentation of the plan to Cabinet as one of his ministry’s achievements, suggested that checks should be made with CH&PA when enquiries about the plan were put to him. According to Baksh, who is now Minister of Education, the last he knew of the plan was that it was with the CH&PA.
In an invited comment to Stabroek News Green said that he is perplexed that a government could ignore a plan which was done with great effort and cost by highly professional people and one which was intended to make the capital city viable, orderly and attractive.
The mayor said that on every occasion he encountered President Bharrat Jagdeo and the relevant minister he would try to “nudge” them into implementing the plan but to no avail. He said he even suggested it be done in phases.
From all indications that plan will never become a reality and this is a far cry from Dr Luncheon’s utterances in November 2002 when he stated, among other things that: “Cabinet provided its strong support for a development plan for Georgetown and one that specifically addresses concerns relating to the drainage, traffic and vendors’ situations and the availability of space within Georgetown.”
At that time he had said that there would have been a consultation with the major stakeholders: private sector, ratepayers, security services and the administration and then there would have been a revised version of the plan. The consultation period was expected to last just one month but it is not clear whether it was ever done.
The plan
A key contention of the draft plan was that modern legislation has to be on the books to underpin its successful implementation. It had said that the current Town and Country Planning Act was obsolete compared to the country’s needs and had to be repealed and replaced or exhaustively overhauled.
Strictly enforced residential, business, entertainment, recreation and conservation zones were also a part of the plan. Khan had cited the need for an overall development policy, the immediate cessation of the ribbon development along the main roads, segregation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic in residential areas and the planning of residential settlements away from the city.
Considering the increasing traffic congestion in the city, the re-routing of vehicles was proposed, entailing the establishment of three minibus termini, a city centre bus route and a parking plan for Georgetown.
A new four-lane road south of the east coast railway with another lane to serve as a by-pass for the east bank, west bank and west coast was also proposed.
Construction of roundabouts at critical junctions to increase traffic capacity was also mooted. Landscaping and the setting aside of conservation zones were also catered for in the plan.
Khan had said that the Georgetown prison should be relocated as well as some of the services of the Guyana Police Force and the Guyana Defence Force which according to him were taking up some prime areas of the city which could be put to more beneficial use.
