Dear Editor,
Stabroek News of Oct 3rd, 08 carried a letter about garbage not being collected in Bartica.
From Sunday to Sunday the Council’s tractor along with a driver and the only two available labourers are seen removing garbage around the village.
They begin each day by first removing the arcade and market waste which because of its amount is then taken to the dump-site. From there they will begin from 1st Avenue onwards.
If because of the amount of garbage removed and trips done there is no more time they would finish in 3rd Avenue.
They begin the next day after the arcade and market are cleared from where they left off the day before. This process will continue until they would have cleared up to the last avenue.
Many times the overseer will receive calls from the different schools which she most times treat as urgent, so she would interrupt the process to deal with these situations.
Obviously these interruptions cause a back up in cleaning and create regular complaints from the public.
The Bartica we have now has dramatically outgrown the inadequate facilities we have at our disposal but we will continue to provide the service once our facilities are in working order.
Just to let you know our tractor is pretty old and underwent engine overhaul two months back which kept us off the road for three weeks straight.
Council proposed to the Ministry to purchase a new tractor with funds ($5M) they have available for Bartica but we were informed that these funds were programmed for our newly proposed dump site internal road.
As I see it any plans for a new dump site will include internal roads as part of the project sum. Why not use the money where it is urgently needed?
As regard flooding, our village has just benefited from the necessary development works to upgrade Bartica to township status.
Our internal roads were asphalted, most of our secondary drains were concreted and a new market and a new administration office were constructed.
We in Bartica are grateful for this new development, but these works were realized without the stakeholders’ full involvement.
The stakeholders were involved during the discussions of these projects but on completion of the projected plans no one returned to us to involve us in structural adjustments suitable to our village requirements, so we ended up with concrete drains that are smaller than what is actually needed especially in our low-lying areas.
Along with drains being small we have to consider the following. Nearly every piece of vacant land that people had has been taken up with additional houses and many yards concreted. Where there were earthen landscapes and earthen roads, these used to help in soaking up some of this water. So all this water now heads for the drains that are not adequate enough. Seventy-five percent of our main drains have not been dug for this year because Bartica has not yet received our $3 million subvention for the year 2008. So, many of these drains are not properly active and worst of all when the river tide is high the kokers are kept closed. So all these situations cause flooding during heavy rains. I wish we could have done better.
The writer of that letter is well aware of all these problems the NDC has to deal with.
In my next letter I will refer to the other areas of concern.
Yours faithfully,
Gerald Joseph
Chairman
Bartica NDC
Region #7
