The sense of contempt and disregard which large sections of the citizenry usually express in response to any reference whatsoever to the Georgetown City Council reflects that feeling of total and complete frustration over its abject failure to come even remotely close to delivering to the capital those services which it is mandated to do. Even allowing for the fact that the municipality always seems to be strapped for cash, one sometimes gets the impression City Hall’s public response to criticism of its ineffectiveness is to tender a succession of excuses and promises many of which, quite simply, do not stand up to scrutiny.

What the revelations of the Burrowes Commission of Enquiry have bared are a litany  of woes inside City Hall that have to do with internal squabbles mostly among elected and appointed city officials, a lack of adequate mechanisms for administering the day-to-day affairs of the city, instances of serious incompetence at high levels within the municipality and deficiencies in the systems that are intended to provide an efficient regime for financial administration and accountability. City Hall asserts, for example, that it is seeking to support of the business community to try to secure at least some of the outstanding rates and taxes in order to execute its 2010 budget. The funny thing is that if you ask City Hall to produce an accurate – or even near accurate – list of delinquent businesses and the amounts owing to the Council it cannot do so. In fact, questions have even been raised as to whether the City’s debt collection people have been doing much beyond sending out the regulation notices to its debtors. The whole situation bespeaks a level of incompetence that is, to say the least, shocking.

And if, as we now know to be the case, City Hall has no reliable data base of outstanding rates and taxes, on what basis has City Hall been effecting its oft-declared major initiatives to step up rates and taxes collection? Again the question arises as to whether the municipality was being honest with the citizenry all along in circumstances where it has never made public the outcomes of these initiatives to bring in outstanding rates and taxes.

Against this backdrop of incompetence, administrative and organizational chaos and what appears to be a deliberate and sustained attempt to mislead the citizenry, some officials at City Hall continue to sustain noises that seem to place the blame for the woes of the City at every door apart from City Hall’s and those noises appear designed not to remedy the existing ills but to create further complications. For sure, the political noises that serve no other purpose but to further burden an already crisis-ridden City Hall is emanating from more than one direction and even if we accept that a friendlier central government would have made for a more effective Council, simply blaming government for the ills of the municipality will take us nowhere.

Some of the issues that have arisen out of City Hall’s latest appeal to the business community to pay up its outstanding rates and taxes have actually redounded to the considerable embarrassment of the Council since, as one businessman put it “if you have no idea as to how much we owe you, how much do you expect us to pay.”  It is, of course, a disingenuous argument – from which, incidentally, the Heads of both the Private Sector Commission and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce have distanced themselves – which appears to be making a thinly disguised case for evading the payment of rates and taxes. The PSC and the GCCI say that businesses must pay up or City Hall must take action against them. The fact of the matter is, however, that here is a clear case in which City Hall’s embarrassment is self-inflicted.

For their part the Heads of both the PSC and the GCCI have made it clear that they want to engage City Hall but that they would want to discuss issues apart from rates and taxes collection and that those issues would include garbage collection. It is, they say, a legitimate business concern though the GCCI President admitted that there may well be numerous cases in which some people are simply hiding behind the excuse of poor municipal services in order to evade their rates and taxes. That may well be so but the fact is that the City would have had a far better case and much stronger backing from the citizenry as a whole if its record of service were better since it is unquestionably true that there are entities trading in the capital who are altogether contemptuous of the desirability of decency, cleanliness and good order and who couldn’t care less about the damage inflicted, for example, through flooding related to the indiscriminate dumping of garbage. These are the people who, as the GCCI President put it, simply “do business.” According to him “today they sell bags, tomorrow, shoes and the next day hats. There is no structure to what they do. It is simply a constant exchange of the maximum amount of goods, any goods, for the maximum amount of return. These are the people who really don’t care about consequences.”

As for the embedded culture of politics that continues to distract City Hall from its substantive purpose and the altogether unsubtle insinuation that, somehow, regime change will bring about a miraculous transformation in the quality of service to the city, nothing could be further from the truth. What we are probably more likely to witness is the replacement of one favoured set of functionaries with another, with the cycle of incompetence, corruption, weak and ineffective management systems and broken promises being the constant in the matrix. For the moment, therefore, the functionaries inside City Hall would be best advised to ease the political rhetoric since few people are paying any serious attention anyway. What they wish to do is judge City Hall by standards that have to do with its capacity to deliver the services that it is mandated to deliver.