Dear Editor,
The laws governing the George-town Municipality seem to have more elasticity than a rubber band.
Throughout the Public Service, officials from the top to the bottom are mandated to take their vacation leave in a timely and structured manner. They are not allowed to carry forward their leave nor be paid in lieu of leave. At City Hall, the Town Clerk and several of his contemporaries have not taken leave in years and are either stacking it up or are being paid for it.
In other municipalities around the country, elections for mayors, deputy mayors, chairmen and deputy chairmen are done at the end of each calendar year. At the Georgetown Muni-cipality the election for these posts seems to be left up to the whims and fancies of the administrators.
At the City Council, they practice a do as I say and not as I do policy, whereby they condemn persons’ buildings that are in a state of disrepair, whilst they sit in the derelict City Hall building pontificating without even trying to fix it. They close eating houses, butcheries etc for insanitary conditions whilst all of the municipal markets are rat infested, are dirty and with leaking roofs, they demand that property owners pay up their rates on time and punish those who are delinquent whilst they owe billions of dollars to the Guyana Revenue Authority, the National Insurance Scheme, the Guyana Power and Light, the Guyana Water Inc. etc for years now and are not paying up one red cent.
They make their workers wait well beyond the prescribed time to be paid, cause them to occupy neglected, decrepit offices whilst they attempt to construct luxury homes for themselves in upscale neighbourhoods. They fail to provide basic police training for their constables whilst instead taking off to distant luxury resorts for special retreats.
It definitely seems to be ‘different strokes for different folks‘ at City Hall. How else could one explain that whilst several low ranking persons received penalties for their dereliction in relation to the juvenile sex scandal case that rocked the city, that nothing was done to reprove a member of the Engineer’s Department and an officer from the Human Resources Department when they were found showing considerable sexual dexterity below a boardroom table in a conference room?
Yours faithfully,
Sean Levius
