Battling piles of garbage

Clarendon Custos William Shagoury has expressed deep concern at the constant littering of the May Pen town centre and how unpleasant it has become for persons doing business there.

"The wholesales empty their garbage at nights and leave it on the roads and it's a problem we have been grappling with. The vendors selling on the sidewalks also contribute to littering the town, and most of them are not paying the parish council anything, so they really don't care what happens after they leave, because they don't live in the town," he said at a recent Gleaner Growth Forum held in the town.

May Pen Mayor Scean Barnswell agreed that street vending was an issue, but explained that the Clarendon Parish Council had been working on solving the problem.

"Street vending is a chronic problem in the town, and I have noticed an increase in the number of street vendors peddling their wares in the town centre since the massive clean-up in downtown Kingston earlier this year," Barnswell said, attributing the situation to the ease of access granted by the highway, which allows free and easy movement across parish borders.

ILLEGAL BUSINESSES

"The challenge we are having with garbage in the town is that there is another set of businesses that start when normal business closes at 6 p.m. Vendors from all parts of Jamaica come to the town as early as 4 p.m. and set up their informal business that goes up to 10 o'clock at nights." He said the night businesses contribute to the pile-up of garbage after hours, as the team from the National Solid Waste Management Authority would have already carried out its routine clean-up of the area. "Night vending begins at 6 p.m. and ends at 7 a.m. the next morning. During this time, vendors come in with makeshift kitchens on handcarts and, wherever they do business, that is where they leave their waste. So when you enter the town at 7 a.m., there is garbage strewn across sections of the town that would have accumulated overnight, and that's not because the garbage wasn't collected the day before."

He said the council was working to put a system in place to hire two persons to keep streets clean by next month.

"One will work from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. and the other will work from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. This will help to keep the main thoroughfares such as Council Street, sections of Sevens Road, Main Street and others clean throughout the day."

May Pen also gets congested quite easily because of the large number of motorists who enter the town to do business on a daily basis. The public parking spaces are woefully inadequate as they are outnumbered by the business places that have sprung up over time.

The long-standing problem of congestion is further compounded by the influx of vendors who sell their wares in the few available parking spots and proceed to hustle prospective shoppers. They also take up spaces on the sidewalks, which forces the pedestrians - including the elderly, children and the disabled - to walk in the streets, exposing them to the possibility of being hit or run over by motorists.

Unscrupulous public passenger vehicle operators competing for passengers on Main Street will stop anywhere to pick up as a part of their daily hustle. In an effort to ease the issue of congestion in the capital, Main Street was made a one-way street to exit the town. The police also carry out regular patrolling duties to curtail this illegal practice, which usually resumes after they are gone.