Sean Nero

Port-of-Spain may­or Louis Lee Sing says Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Chan­dresh Shar­ma is sti­fling the growth nec­es­sary to trans­form the cap­i­tal by his in­sis­tence on play­ing pet­ty pol­i­tics with the City Cor­po­ra­tion. Lee Sing slammed what he de­scribed as "reck­less," at­tempts by the line min­is­ter to de­rail ini­tia­tives crit­i­cal to mak­ing Port-of-Spain in­to the me­trop­o­lis of the Caribbean. Speak­ing at a cer­e­mo­ny to mark the 97th an­niver­sary of the Restora­tion of Mu­nic­i­pal Rights to the City of Port-of-Spain held at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel on Mon­day-where the cor­po­ra­tion ho­n­oured eleven cit­i­zens and burgess­es for out­stand­ing ser­vice-Lee Sing said Shar­ma was wrong if he felt that it was the cor­po­ra­tion and not the peo­ple, who would be pained by his ac­tions.

"The will­ful with­hold­ing of ap­provals of bud­get al­lo­ca­tions in­tend­ed for the de­vel­op­ment of the city is no dif­fer­ent from that of an em­bar­go or block­age on our city. "When ap­provals are not giv­en be­cause some­one has had a toothache, you know gov­ern­ment is not work­ing for the peo­ple and in­stead is work­ing against the peo­ple," Lee Sing said. "This is sim­ply un­ac­cept­able com­ing from in­di­vid­u­als who have tak­en an oath to serve all of the peo­ple with­out fear or favour. "The on­go­ing at­tempts by the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment to in­ter­fere in the af­fairs of the city con­sume un­nec­es­sary time and oth­er re­sources." Lee Sing re­ferred to the re­cent head- butting be­tween him­self and Shar­ma over the non-use King George V Park in St Clair, for park­ing dur­ing the T20 in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et match be­tween West In­dies and In­dia, as but one ex­am­ple of the min­is­ter's in­ter­fer­ence of his cor­po­ra­tion's man­age­ment of the city.

"There are some with­in our so­ci­ety who have now be­come reck­less to a fault," he said. "Some may even sug­gest that such reck­less­ness threat­ens the very de­mo­c­ra­t­ic process­es, many in our so­ci­ety have worked so dili­gent­ly to grow and to pro­tect. "Mem­bers of coun­cil are very con­scious of the chal­lenges that con­front us and we wish to as­sure all that we will re­sist any at­tempts to un­der­mine the au­thor­i­ty of the Port-of-Spain Cor­po­ra­tion." Lee Sing said, how­ev­er, that the cor­po­ra­tion would not be dis­tract­ed from its man­date to lead and man­age the city and pledged to find cre­ative and or­gan­ised ways to cir­cum­vent the chal­lenges which he said Shar­ma had set about to cre­ate. He de­clared that the cor­po­ra­tion would re­sist any at­tempts to un­der­mine its au­thor­i­ty and out­lined a clear man­date for his ad­min­is­tra­tion's dri­ve to pro­vide the best ser­vice to all users of the city and with a spe­cif­ic fo­cus on pub­lic health.

"The task of turn­ing the for­tunes of the City of Port-of-Spain rests on the shoul­ders of all...Port-of-Spain does not be­long to the coun­cil or the cor­po­ra­tion, the UNC or the COP," Lee Sing said. "Port-of-Spain is ours and it is ours to pro­tect from all per­sons, who by their be­hav­iour sug­gest that Port-of-Spain must be em­bar­goed on burgess­es who choose to lit­ter by re­mov­ing garbage from their prop­er­ty and plac­ing it out­side a neigh­bour's or by a busi­ness per­son who leaves garbage for the street dwellers to close­ly ex­am­ine and in the process cre­ate may­hem on our streets. "If there are ro­dents and oth­er ver­min with­in the city, it is the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of all to fix it...Af­ter all, we can't ex­pect to get rid of ro­dents and roach­es with every Tom, Cin­tra and Har­ri­lal sell­ing food on every avail­able pave­ment. "It is in this con­text, the Port-of-Spain City Coun­cil has giv­en full sup­port to the pub­lic health and po­lice de­part­ments, to do what is nec­es­sary to an end to il­le­gal vend­ing across the city."

THE AWARDEES

BUSI­NESS: Williams H Scott Ltd

SPORT: Hase­ly Craw­ford, An­tho­ny Wick­ham

ED­U­CA­TION: Eliz­a­beth Crouch

RE­LI­GION: Fr Ja­son Gor­don

EN­VI­RON­MENT: Sharon Hall

EX­EM­PLARY SER­VICE: Sir El­lis Clarke (Posthu­mous­ly), Madam Jus­tice Jean Per­manand.

COM­MU­NI­TY SER­VICE: Jean V El­der, Clive Bel­grave and Sal­va­tion Army