PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

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.