Six weeks after they withdrew their services due to City Hall’s failure to pay hundreds of millions in arrears, garbage collection companies Cevons Waste Management Inc. and Puran Brothers Waste Disposal Inc. are yet to hear from the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) on settling its debt to them.
“They haven’t reached out to us and it is disrespectful to be treated this way,” Morse Archer, Managing Director of Cevons Waste Management Inc., said.
Despite the situation, Archer said he remains optimistic that they would be able to engage in discussions with the city’s administration to move forward.
The companies are owed over $300 million in total for work dating back to 2015.
Additionally, Kaleshwar Puran, General Manager for Puran Brothers Waste Disposal Inc. said that his company has also been trying in vain to contact city officials. “We haven’t been invited to meet with them and we are calling the phones but it keeps ringing out. They are not telling us anything,” he said in an invited comment. “I think this is wrong. We have worked and transformed the garbage situation and they have not contacted us as yet…,” he added.
Puran said he is hopeful that “goodness would prevail and they meet with us,” while noting that because of the non-payment his company’s cash flow has been stifled and this has led to a bad relationship with a bank to which it is indebted.
Meanwhile, Mayor Patricia Chase-Green recently said that the council has not “discussed the way forward yet to see where we can find the money to pay the contractors and we have to look at it and we are looking at all areas of our revenue.”
However, the mayor assured that the administration would engage in a full discussion with the companies soon. Although she said Town Clerk Royston King has been in contact with Archer, up to the time this publication spoke with the Managing Director he said that his company had not been contacted since it withdrew its services. “We have to speak to them. They have given us service for over 20 years and we can’t just cut them off,” Chase-Green said.
Since the withdrawal by both companies, the City Hall and three small contractors it hired have assumed responsibility for collection in the city’s wards.
