peter.christopher@guardian.co.tt
Don’t urinate on the Red House, there are open and clean public washrooms in Port-of-Spain.
This was a call made by Port-of-Spain Mayor Joel Martinez at City Hall yesterday as he lamented the public’s lack of concern for cleanliness in the city.
“Today I was driving here, and I saw a gentleman urinating on the fence by the Red House. Took a picture of him and passed it on to the council. Now our infrastructure, which is our public convenience, is in Woodford Square. Just across the road, it’s clean,” lamented the mayor during a press conference.
The mayor stressed that the City Corporation had started a programme to ensure all public washrooms are clean and open to the public.
“The mayor is going to walk to any washroom that is managed by the Port-of-Spain City Corporation at any point to check and see if the infrastructure is clean enough for you to utilise,” said Martinez. “So we want to discourage a gentleman like that from urinating against the Red House fence on Hart Street and utilise the public convenience.”
The mayor said such symptomatic behaviour which contributed to the capital city constantly being afflicted with problems like littering.
“All it would have taken was a few minutes for him to get to the washroom but you see bad habits crept into our society. People urinating anywhere, people dropping garbage anywhere. This is our city we claim to be ours and nationalists but you know what we stink and ‘dutty’ when we ready,” said Martinez who urged the public to do their part to clean up the city.
“Let’s bring back the programme... let’s chase Charlie away kinda thing. Why can’t we do that?” he added.
During the press conference, the mayor confirmed that vendors will return to Charlotte Street on February 7.
“We are required to re-license the vendors who would have (been a part of the programme before), some of them are up to date with their payments some of them are in arrears,” said the mayor, who explained that vendors who were still owing rent to the City Corporation were given until January 31 to settle their debt.
The vending programme was stopped on December 31, since then the City Corporation has been engaged in clean up work on Charlotte Street.