Vendors facing removal from La Penitence Market are expected to meet with President Bharrat Jagdeo sometime next week as works on the area identified for their relocation are still to begin.
Yesterday vendors told this newspaper that they were told by an official at the Office of the President that President Jagdeo will meet with them
sometime next week because he had only recently returned to Guyana.
There are some 50 vendors from the market who vend along Saffon Street who are facing relocation since the government decided last year to return the street to a two-way roadway to ease congestion from East Bank bound traffic.
Last month when works on the Sussex Street bridge began some 16 vendors were allotted space inside the market. But those vendors were faced with the challenge of rebuilding their stalls.
However, protest action by the other vendors brought the intervention of the president who offered the assurance that he would see they are properly placed before their stalls were demolished.
Independence Boulevard, popularly known as Punt Trench, was identified by the vendors as one of three possible relocation sites.
The president had told the vendors in his previous meeting with them that a tarmac could be constructed at Punt Trench and it could be lighted and a police mobile unit stationed there.
Vendors had first opposed the Punt Trench location because they feared vandalism and theft.
Meanwhile, Mayor of Georgetown Hamilton Green had expressed his dissatisfaction with the vendors being placed at the Punt Trench location, contending that it would have been a violation of the rights of citizens who live there.
The mayor expressed these views at Monday’s Mayor and City Council statutory meeting. He suggested that the empty plot of land on Punt Trench opposite the residents be used instead of the James and Saffon Street empty plot.
Yesterday in an invited comment Chairman of the Markets and Public Health Committee and Deputy Mayor Robert Williams said that the committee is currently stalled since “the government promise the people to prepare Independence Boule-vard for them so we are waiting to hear something in that respect.”
