Garbage collection crisis continues

The opposition People’s National Party (PNP) is urging the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) to address the issue of garbage pile up in communities across the Corporate area and St Catherine.

Dr. Angella Brown Burke, Opposition Spokesperson on Local Government, is warning that the garbage pile up is likely to trigger a public health emergency, arguing that it has reached crisis level.

In a statement on Tuesday evening, Dr. Brown Burke declared that garbage has not been collected in some communities for the past four weeks, as a consequence of which residents have dumped their garbage in gullies.

According to Dr Brown Burke, the NSWMA is desperately in need of funding in order to make outstanding payments to contractors.

“It (NSWMA) is vastly underfunded, because individuals who have equipment and trucks… they have not been paid for a long time and that has been part of the problem; that (these) individuals have refused to put their equipment on the landfill, and that trucks, because some of them (the owners) have not been paid, they have reduced the trips because they cannot afford to do it,” she told RJR News in a follow-up interview.

She added that there also needs to be better dissemination of information about the problems being experienced by the NSWMA, as failure to do this this leads to further problems, such as improper disposal of garbage in inappropriate locations such as gullies.

Chung

In response, Dennis Chung, Chairman of the NSWMA, has confirmed that there were outstanding payments to some contractors.

He said some payments were made on Tuesday, but there are still balances remaining.

Mr Chung said the NSWMA has been urging the government to increase its funding to the authority.

“At the start of the year, we put in a budget for six billion dollars and what was approved was three billion dollars,” he revealed on RJR’s Beyond the Headlines.

The current payment crisis was therefore not a surprise, he declared.

Contractors are owed two months back pay on average, “which is unacceptable,” he explained.

He said the crisis cannot be attributed to the heavy rains that the country has experienced over the last few months, as "even without the rains, we do not have the money that we need for proper garbage collection in the country."