An open let­ter to His Wor­ship the May­or of Port-of-Spain:

Adam Smith Square is not on­ly ide­al­ly lo­cat­ed, but it is al­so one of the best main­tained pub­lic ar­eas in and around Port-of-Spain. It is there­fore not sur­pris­ing that the Love Move­ment Choir would have cho­sen to put on their free pub­lic Christ­mas con­cert there last Sat­ur­day evening.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, the on­ly park­ing avail­able is street-park­ing. An oth­er­wise ex­treme­ly pleas­ant evening turned in­to one of hor­ror and stress for those cit­i­zens who availed them­selves of an op­por­tu­ni­ty to come out to hear vin­tage Christ­mas and oth­er songs.

The ma­raud­ing wreck­er crews, in a man­ner rem­i­nis­cent of the yes­ter­year brig­ands and pi­rates, were amass­ing small for­tunes at the ex­pense of the at­ten­dees at the con­cert. It was so sad to see some of the folks, among whom were the el­der­ly, come out to en­joy an evening of fun just have their ve­hi­cle towed away.

Now, I am not one to con­done il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ty, but at the same time I can­not show in­sen­si­tiv­i­ty to the dif­fer­ence be­tween the let­ter of the law and the spir­it of the law. I am say­ing that those cars that were re­moved were not (i) dis­turb­ing the free flow of traf­fic, (ii) block­ing ac­cess to any­one's dri­ve­way, or (iii) caus­ing a pub­lic nui­sance.

If I were con­vinced that the re­al mo­ti­va­tion for the en­thu­si­as­tic op­er­a­tion of the wreck­ing crews was to en­sure that park­ing laws are not bro­ken, then this let­ter would have not been writ­ten, but I have se­ri­ous reser­va­tions about that. I chal­lenge the au­thor­i­ties to change the pay­ment sys­tem to the wreck­er own­ers to a flat month­ly fee for their ser­vice, and then we will re­al­ly see how con­cerned they are about park­ing laws.

Dave Be­har­ry

West­moor­ings