The 2003 Urban Development Programme was fiscally beneficial for regional administrations
One wonders how many players in the construct of Local Government and Regional Development would have heard of the existence of an Urban Development Programme instituted some 18 years ago in 2003. It involved a very professional Valuation Division within the Ministry of Finance. That Division has since disappeared. But the objective of its operations was to provide and certify a consistent system of evaluating property in the then six municipalities for their purpose, amongst others, of utilising evidenced based values for application of rates and taxes. At the time of the exercise the Municipalities involved were Georgetown, Linden, Corriverton, Rose Hall, New Amsterdam and Anna Regina. For what it is worth the following was the Organisation Construct:
At the time the Chief Evaluation Officer was Dennis Patterson who was the first Guyanese to qualify in Estate Management, at the London School of Economics. The Programme in fact involved the new computer technology of the period which could view and assess individual structures – the first locally known experience of Google Earth, led by a team of highly motivated professionals, it was creatively executed by graduates all of a wellrespected Guyana Technical Institute. The aim of course was to update values of property to which more realistic rates could be applied by the various Municipalities. The system also certified the value of property in individual transactions. Regretfully as it turned out, the evidential results when submitted were scuttled by the Government of the day.
Obviously, such an exercise is again critically needed in the face of the progressive erection of various types and values of both private and high level commercial property, ample returns from which the whole Regional Administration system is substantively losing out. Too late perhaps the need for active redress may not be shared by the appropriate decision-makers, and of course the very clients. But it is the latter who complain of the deterioration of public safety and health, and related services, particularly by the mis-managers of our capital city, and whose own workplace is said to be an embarrassment to the very citizenship who benefit from the constipated system of rates and taxes.
Sincerely, GHK Lall