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Sunday, July 20, 2025

New mayor goes after Charlotte St vendors

by

20160226

New­ly-ap­point­ed may­or of Port-of-Spain Keron Valen­tine says his im­me­di­ate fo­cus will be il­le­gal vend­ing on Char­lotte Street and the rein­tro­duc­tion of a wreck­ing pol­i­cy in the cap­i­tal.

He is ex­pect­ed to an­nounce the wreck­ing pol­i­cy for the city at a news con­fer­ence to­day.

"The wreck­ing pol­i­cy will fo­cus pri­mar­i­ly on mo­torists who block burgess­es' dri­ve­ways, who park on side­walks and in­dis­crim­i­nate­ly on cor­ners.

"That was the ini­tial plan. It will fo­cus pri-mar­i­ly on burgess­es af­fect­ed when their dri­ve­ways are be­ing blocked," he said.

The new may­or said so yes­ter­day at the first statu­to­ry meet­ing since he was sworn in as may­or on Feb­ru­ary 17 to re­place for­mer may­or Ray­mond Tim Kee.

He said he would be vis­it­ing Char­lotte Street to ob­serve a sit­u­a­tion which had be­come un­ruly in re­cent times.

"There are a lot of wrong things go­ing on there. There are a lot of il­le­gal ven­dors there and peo­ple are block­ing up the road which is a prob­lem for emer­gency ser­vices.

"We will be treat­ing with the Char­lotte Street sit­u­a­tion ag­gres­sive­ly," Valen­tine added.

He said there would be a re­struc­tur­ing of the pro­gramme which al­lowed ven­dors to sell on the street.

A walk on Char­lotte Street yes­ter­day showed ven­dors lin­ing both sides of the pave­ment sell­ing a range of goods in­clud­ing fresh pro­duce, herbs, kitchen tow­els, toy cars, un­der­wear and pi­rate CDs.

Bel­mont taxis ma­noeu­vre down the street slow­ly to avoid the­p­edes­tri­an traf­fic and peo­ple milling about to pur­chase items.

Valen­tine said some of the ven­dors were not au­tho­rised by the cor­po­ra­tion and would be moved.

He not­ed that dis­cus-sions were still on­go­ing to find a lo­ca­tion to place ven­dors from the Sal­va­tori site on Fred­er­ick Street.

Ven­dors are re­quired to va­cate the Sal­va­tori site by Mon­day.

Valen­tine, who was 30 min­utes late to the city cor­po­ra­tion's statu­to­ry meet­ing yes­ter­day and­failed to at­tend a speak­ing en­gage­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies'

St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus on Wednes­day, said the may­or's sched­uled had proved to be chal­leng­ing.

He re­spond­ed to crit­i­cism over miss­ing the sched­uled speak­ing ap­point­ment:

"I had to be at the East Dry Riv­er to get the Zi­ka cam­paign off the ground."

He said the cam­paign in­clud­ed a clean-up ex­er­cise of the riv­er and re­mov­ing shacks set up there by the home­less.


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