In an attempt to give City Engineer Colvern Venture the scope and support to perform his duties, the Human Resources Committee of the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) has recommended that disciplinary action be taken against several members of the department.
As a result, the men may soon find themselves in possession of disciplinary letters if a recommendation is accepted by the full council.
For seven hours on May 16, members of the department sought to defend themselves against accusations that they had neglected their duties and failed to cooperate with the City Engineer.
The officers appeared before the Human Resources Committee on the recommendation of Mayor Patricia Chase-Green, who at the May 9, statutory meeting recommended that disciplinary action be taken against three members of the department over flooding in the city.
Chairman of the committee, Oscar Clarke has told Stabroek News that in spite of the defence presented by the engineers the Mayor’s observations were “in general proven true.”
As a result of this finding, Clarke explained, action is to be taken in the case of each officer.
“We have to set a standard and hold their feet to the fire,” he stated, adding that the situation in the engineering department is crucial and unless people are serious the impact will be detrimental.
At the May 9 meeting, the mayor noted that subsequent to flash flooding last December, three engineers were placed on a rotating shift to oversee the operations of the sluices and pumps and asked to submit regular reports to Venture. It has been claimed by Venture that they failed to fulfil these duties.
However, the engineers identified have denied this accusation noting that for months they submitted reports chronicling persistent problems which were never addressed by Venture until the Mayor became involved.
Chase-Green, who sat in on the committee meeting, has for months been very vocal in her criticism of the department going so far in March as to call it out for laziness and inefficiency and promise that strong action would be taken.
“We cannot allow… people to sit down for a second year in important offices and not do their work. People are complaining every day of the service provided by the City Engineer’s Department. Sometimes you have people coming three to four months then being told that their application is not in order…,” Chase-Green lamented. “If you ask them to do something, you will get the report three months after,” she had added.
Meanwhile, Clarke also claimed that media reports about the accusations factored into the committee’s decision.
“We took into consideration that a lot was said on this matter in the press even before it made it to the committee. A lot of the content was in the public domain before the committee saw it and that influenced the committee’s decision,” Clarke said.
Asked if this action was not in direct contradiction to a pronouncement from Minister of Communities Ronald Bulkan that whistleblowers should be protected, Clarke declared that the revelations made by the men did not qualify as whistleblowing.
At least two of the engineers accused had submitted to the Human Resources Officer of the M&CC, written responses to the accusations brought against them. On the day of the hearings Stabroek News had reported on the content of these submissions, in which Venture had been accused of failing to act on their recommendations and manipulating the department for his own personal gain.
