Dear Editor,
Understandably, the parking meters contract and the by-laws push the anti-colonial buttons of the people, just like the Sithe Global deal did. Like the Sithe Global deal, the parking meters contract and the by-laws purport to turn the jurisdiction into a colony of a foreign enterprise. In the case of Smart City Solutions (SCS), they attempt to make the city a colony of SCS for the most productive half of the day, six days a week.
This hits the pocketbook hard, especially of those who labour during those productive hours. And this hits pocketbook frighteningly hard of those suddenly deprived of their sovereign right of temporary parking, inviting draconian punishment for non-compliance.
But if the city council failed to anticipate these problems, what should have arrested the Mayor and the Town Clerk from stepping off these shores to fly into a snare in a foreign country, was the economic boondoggle of any such scheme.
By surrendering the city’s streets and parapets to a foreign entity, the city council, in effect, surrenders the scarce foreign currency reserves of the country to that company. What economic sense does it make to use foreign currency to pay for parking? Parking meters generate local currency, not foreign currency. So why should the country dip into its scarce foreign currency to reimburse a foreign entity for doing business on its shores? SCS will remit in hard currency, not Guyana dollars.
This should have knocked out the idea conceptually, before the Mayor even considered leaving Guyana to get stuck in this disastrous situation. Had the Mayor and the Town Clerk considered the economic ramifications of the proposal, they would not have fallen prey to the scheme to prolong the proposed drain on the country’s scarce foreign exchange for 49 years, or even for the later amended period.
Sithe Global would have done this, and more, for 20 years. Smart City Solutions smartly proposed to do this in the first instance for 49 years, and now for a less extended period. They’re turning the city into a colony, not only for themselves, but for their children, and their children’s children.
The solution to the problem should have been to keep it local. The city council working with the relevant authorities in the central government, could have levied a small fee on automobile and truck owners, and kept the entire proceeds for itself. This way, the city council would have had no need to engage any outside group, only to get 20%, and cause the citizenry to suffer a rise in blood pressure, and slams to their pocketbooks and to the foreign reserves of Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
P Williams
