Parking and dumping!

Apr 04, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – Two articles recently caught my attention that are worthy of public comment. The first related to parking in the city and the second the alleged indiscriminate dumping of garbage on a city parapet.
The City Council is said to have approved for a part of the Merriman Mall to be set aside for parking for a business enterprise. No doubt, the beneficial party will be expected to pay some form of rental. In addition, the approval of this plan would appear to be supportive of the businesses.
However, there is a bigger problem, which has to be addressed not by the Georgetown City Council but by the Central Housing and Planning Authority. It concerns the approving of building permits without provision being made for customer parking. It would appear that it is quite commonplace for businesses to be erected within the city and to be approved for such usage without any consideration being given to parking.
Georgetown is changing. However, it is changing for the worse not the better. Moreover, the major culprit is the Central Housing and Planning Authority, which appears to have little sense of what is known as zoning.
Georgetown is not designed for the number of businesses, which are being established within its precincts. Many of the streets in Georgetown are narrow and with so many persons already owning cars, the city streets are being congested. When businesses are added to areas designed more for residential rather than commercial usage, it adds to the problems.
The Government had promised to reconstitute the Central Housing and Planning Authority. But before it does this, it should design a new zoning plan for the country. Anyone it appears can simply buy a property and apply to have it converted into a commercial lot. This is happening even outside of the city in government housing schemes, which are not supposed to have any commercial enterprises. The only way to stop this cavalier violation of zoning laws is to impose extremely high taxes on businesses erected in residential and former residential areas. Unless the government acts and acts immediately to arrest the zoning problem, Georgetown will become unmanageable.
Recently we read about a new hotel being erected in the city. But nothing was said about where the clients and customers of that new hotel will park. This is the sort of mismanagement, which is resulting in chaos in the country.
The second issue concerns the alleged indiscriminate dumping of pharmaceuticals on a city parapet. It may have been put there for a private garbage collector to uplift. It is not unusual for persons to place their solid waste on the parapets, either for the municipal authorities to remove or for disposal by private waste collection.
We must not read too much into what was found. It was reported that the waste was found in proximity to a building, which once provided medical services and this could well have been a house-cleaning exercise.
If you are doing spring cleaning of your property, where else are you going to deposit the waste other than on your parapet. The fact that this was done does not mean that there were no plans to have the items collected for proper disposal. It is just that the waste disposal was not done simultaneously with the house cleaning.
The dumping of solid waste onto parapets is a national problem. Only recently, the Mayor of New Amsterdam was bemoaning the indiscriminate dumping of solid waste on that town’s parapets.
This discovery of the solid waste on the parapets in Georgetown comes at a time when the government has suddenly discovered that the health system has a shortage of drugs. This is also a matter, which requires an investigation. Surely if there was a drug management system, whether manual or automated, this problem ought not to have arisen. And it is mind-boggling that it took the authorities a full eight months to decipher that there is a problem.
The situation is fraught with suspicion. It needs to be confirmed just how such a situation has arisen and who is to be held responsible. This requires an independent investigation.
The added advantage of such an investigation, apart from getting to the truth, would be to ensure that this shortage is not a contrived crisis aimed at the government trying to make emergency procurement from one of its most favoured suppliers.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)