Mayor Patricia Chase-Green yesterday recused herself from serving as a member of the new City Council negotiating team that will work to iron out issues with Smart City Solutions (SCS) on the metered parking project.
“Please, as we are going forward, I would not like to be nominated to be a part of this team,” she told councillors around the horse-shoe table at the conclusion of the statutory meeting.
There will be an extraordinary meeting of the council on Wednesday to engage in further discussions on the way forward for the project.
According to the Mayor, during Wednesday’s meeting they would be nominating names of councillors to sit on the renegotiating team and the terms of reference would also be established. Once this is done, the team would move to engage in new public consultation.
In an invited comment at the end of the meeting, the mayor said many accusations were made against her and as a result she would not like to be a part of the new negotiating team.
“I was just a witness in the first part of it and I don’t want to be a part of it now… I want fresh minds to go into it and look at it so they can see nothing was under the covers and nothing was corrupt about the deal…,” Chase-Green told Stabroek News yesterday.
Wednesday’s meeting will be the second one held for discussions on the parking project. At the first meeting, councillors requested copies of the original contract to make comparisons between that and the amended contract.
APNU Councillor Oscar Clarke had requested that councillors be furnished with the original contract, since meaningful discussions and comparisons could not be made in the absence of that. Chase-Green told Stabroek News that the contract was circulated to councillors and it is expected that they would be able to go through the contract “clause by clause” and air their views at Wednesday’s meeting.
The controversial metered parking project is currently on hold for 90 days and government has recommended that the time be used for review of the agreement.
City Hall and SCS signed the Georgetown Metered Parking Contract on May 13, 2016. The contract, which allows the foreign-owned company to charge for parking in the city and institute penalties on those drivers who fail to pay, has been the subject of controversy since it started. Protest at the level of the council by Duncan and other councillors led to two reviews of the contract, by the Ministry of Finance and the Attorney General’s Office. They found that the contract was not in the best interest of the residents of Georgetown.
However, the project continued with an amended contract signed on September 16, 2016. This amended contract reduced the term of the project from 49 years to 20 years and reduced the fee to be paid from $125 for 15 minutes to $50 for 15 minutes. President David Granger had referred to the original price as “onerous”.
Once implemented on January 23, 2017 the project became the subject of a boycott and weekly protests by the Movement Against Parking Meters, which with large groups of supporters, has stood in front of City Hall for one hour a week, calling first for the reduction of the rates and then for the scrapping of the contract.
