The Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion (POSCC) will em­bark on a reg­is­tra­tion ex­er­cise for ven­dors in St James with­in the next month. Short­ly af­ter, a sim­i­lar process will be in­tro­duced for ven­dors in the cap­i­tal city of Port-of-Spain.

This is ac­cord­ing to Port-of-Spain May­or Joel Mar­tinez who ad­mit­ted il­le­gal and un­reg­u­lat­ed street vend­ing has got­ten out of hand. Speak­ing on CNC 3’s The Morn­ing Brew, Mar­tinez de­scribed the is­sue as a “bug­bear for the city.”

He said while he un­der­stands why there has been a pro­lif­er­a­tion of street ven­dors in re­cent times, it can­not be al­lowed to con­tin­ue.

“Yes, I un­der­stand that times are dif­fi­cult and that vend­ing is a prod­uct of dif­fi­cult economies, but when it gets out of hand, it be­comes a prob­lem,” he said, adding that while dif­fi­cult times en­cour­age peo­ple to do things dif­fer­ent­ly, it is still no ex­cuse to break the law.

He said: “Some peo­ple may not have want­ed to end up be­ing a ven­dor but due to the cir­cum­stances, they have to make a liv­ing and they find what­ev­er pos­si­ble means they can with­out hav­ing to turn to crime to be able to sus­tain their fam­i­lies, so I em­pathize with them.”

Com­ment­ing on plans for the re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion of Port-of-Spain, Mar­tinez said: “You can’t build a cap­i­tal city with chaos. You have to at some stage man­age the sit­u­a­tion. It’s not as if we don’t want ven­dors be­cause we have struc­tured the Char­lotte Street ven­dors and we have al­lowed them to have a con­tract to feel a sense of in­de­pen­dence and pur­pose.”

Mar­tinez said a reg­is­tra­tion form is cur­rent­ly be­ing de­vel­oped for the ex­er­cise in St James and will be tweaked be­fore it is pre­sent­ed to ven­dors in Port-of-Spain.

He said city of­fi­cials could not con­tin­ue to use po­lice re­sources to con­stant­ly re­move ven­dors and al­so at­tend court hear­ings, so the new process of be­ing de­vel­oped to deal with il­le­gal street vend­ing once and for all.