City silent on progress in renegotiating parking meter deal

While City Hall’s team remains silent about how it intends to renegotiate the metered parking contract, the Movement Against Parking Meters (MAPM) maintains that it is ready to return to the streets if the agreement with contractor Smart City Solutions (SCS) is not rescinded.

Almost two months after the parking metered bylaws were suspended and three weeks after the appointment of a negotiating team chaired by Councillor Malcolm Ferreira, the city administration has made no public statement about how the renegotiation process is progressing.

Stabroek News has reached out to Ferreira several times over the last two weeks to ascertain the efforts made to reach some sort of consensus with SCS and other stakeholders but to no avail. Each time he has been contacted, Ferreira has promised that the team’s secretary, Assistant Town Clerk Sherry Jerrick, would be issuing a press statement but 10 days after the first such promise has seen no statement forthcoming. This is despite Ferreira having told the council at last Monday’s statutory meeting that an update on the team’s activity would be provided to the public before the end of the week.

So far, the team members have met with Minister of Communities Ronald Bulkan, who urged them to negotiate a contract that the entire council can freely support. There is no evidence that they have reached out to any other stakeholders and MAPM, which has been at the forefront of the opposition to the controversial project, told Stabroek News that it has not heard a “peep” from City Hall.

Don Singh, speaking on behalf of the group, explained that MAPM is not impressed by the work it has seen from the renegotiating team and noted that the group will continue to lobby for the contract to be rescinded through social activism, which includes resumption of street protests.

He noted that the group will not acknowledge any renegotiation of the contract’s terms and conditions since the original contract and its subsequent amendments are themselves invalid.

“This contract to SCS did not follow the rules and regulations governing public procurement, so we urge the M&CC and its negotiating committee to use the opportunity provided to them to conceive and implement a system of paid parking and or traffic regulation that is fair to all citizens and not just a select few,” he said.

MAPM is calling for the requisite traffic, feasibility and impact studies to be conducted and for City Hall to engage in proper consultation and adhere to the rules of public procurement.

He said MAPM supports the reported position of Minister Bulkan that the negotiating committee is free to negotiate a new contract with a different company with the proviso that the public procurement rules are adhered to.

The highly-controversial metered parking project is currently on a threemonth suspension, following a wave of protests and calls for the contract’s revocation. Central government has suspended the bylaws which empower the project for 90 days and recommended that the time be used to review the agreement. The suspension order was signed on March 21, 2017.

The original contract, which was signed on May 13, 2016, was negotiated by Mayor Patricia ChaseGreen, Town Clerk Royston King, Chair of the Finance Committee Oscar Clark and Finance Committee member Junior Garrett.

While these individuals maintain that the terms were finalized with the help of a team of local lawyers, many including the Ministries of Finance and Legal Affairs have not been impressed by the contract.

In its review, the Finance Ministry described the deal in some areas as exploitive and labelled the city’s outlook on aspects of the deal as “ignorant.”

It stated in its general observations that “Government procurement practices may have been violated, in that a tender was not advertised and bids reviewed for acceptance based on certain criteria and as such justifies a revoking of the contract by Government and the retendering”.

The city administration was also criticized for failing to undertake a financial analysis and feasibility study to determine, in part, whether the projection for revenue and cost from the industry are fair to itself.

Consequently the ministry had advised that the council either undertake a study of putting metered parking, parking facilities and towing and recovery system within the city on its own accord or re-tender for bidding for the six zones within Georgetown separately, so as to allow