Dear Editor,
Like a mediaeval queen, Her Worship the Mayor has issued her decree from up high in the form of a letter to the February 5 edition of Sunday Stabroek: ‘M&CC will continue to push ahead with parking meters’.
The Mayor should get with the programme.
The five hundred plus people she saw protesting on Friday don’t care about who belongs to the PPP or to APNU. We are way past that old time nonsense. Regardless of our political beliefs we share the same views about corruption, the accountability of elected officials and transparency. Read our collective lips: ‘We don’t care about party politics when it comes to the meters’.
The Mayor should stop worrying about who is “high class”, “middle class” or “low class” and start worrying about what our Ministry of Finance said about the meter project in its review:
* “The findings of the review underpin a call for a reconsideration of the feasibility and hence the viability of the project( s) of the MCCCG to provide quality service to the citizens and businesses of Georgetown and its environs and to the Nation as a whole.”
* “Overall the team has concluded that subject to legal implications, there are grounds for the contract to be withdrawn.”
* “Re-tender (assuming that it was done before and includes provision for funding by the tenderers) for bidding in the six zones with Georgetown, separately, so as to allow for greater competition.”
This same report finds that Smart City Solutions, in their dealings with the Mayor, adopted what they term as a “rogue approach to exploit the apparent ignorance of M&CC [City of Georgetown] business and financial analyses competencies.”
When the Mayor sees the empty parking spaces on the streets, she is seeing what the public truly thinks about her project. Those empty spaces are not the doing of any movement against parking meters. They are the spontaneous reaction of a citizenry which cannot afford the draconian fees, which doesn’t like to be bullied and which senses that something is amiss.
I note that Mayor Chase-Green refers to the “new era of council democracy.” Given the heavy-handed manner in which she is dealing with the response to the meter programme, her use of this phrase is indeed ironic.
Yours faithfully,
Marcel Gaskin
