‘Spanish Town is nasty’

An increase in mini-dump sites – partly due to irregular garbage collection – in Spanish Town, St Catherine, has prompted Mayor Norman Scott to call on the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) to establish an emergency response team to deal with the crisis in a two-week period.

Pleading for garbage collection to revert to municipal corporations during Thursday’s meeting of the St Catherine Municipal Corporation, Treadways Councillor Sydney Rose said the pile-up of waste across the Old Capital was a crisis.

“This garbage situation is at a crisis proportion. Spanish Town is nasty. Rodents and roaches are all over the place. I think the time has come for the collection of garbage to return to the municipal corporations. I am positive they will do a better job,” Rose said.

He was supported by Westchester Councillor Renair Benjamin, who urged the corporation to ask the prime minister to declare St Catherine a disaster parish.

Scott took issue with the suggestion, but agreed that the garbage collection system was not working in the interest of the people and the town.

“I have personally observed the garbage situation and numerous mini-garbage dumps in different sections of town,” the mayor said. “But what we need is the NSWMA to deploy enough resources to clear the entire backlog and to clean all these mini-garbage dumps that have [popped] up in the town.”

Scott added: “What is happening at the Old Harbour Road roundabout with pile-up of solid waste and garbage is a disgrace; they (NSWMA) have the resources and they need to address this crisis,” Scott said.

“When you drive on Manchester Street, there are several mini-garbage dumps; inside the Number 5 Cemetery; there is one on King Street, and I could go on. I hear people bashing me on talk shows about how nasty the town is, but when I call NSWMA, no one responds, it seems to me that no collection is done in inner cities so the people have no other choice but to raise up mini-garbage dumps,” he concluded.

NSWMA parish officer Daniel Heaven acknowledged that there was a backlog in garbage collection, which he said was largely due to inadequate resources.

He, however, said that the agency has started doing night collections to clear the backlog.

“The truth about it is that mini-garbage dumps have increased and I have spoken to the public health inspector for Spanish Town to get me an estimate of all the mini-garbage dumps across Spanish Town,” he said, adding that the agency is now increasing the resources inside the St Catherine capital to ensure that the town centre is kept clean throughout the day.

ruddy.mathison@gleanerjm.com