Earl Moxam, Contributor
AFTER TWO weeks of unremitting public scrutiny over the handling of his job as executive chairman of the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA), Alston Stewart remains unbowed and unapologetic about the major
decisions that he has made in
running the country's sanitation agency.
These decisions, he maintains, were made in good faith and in the best interest of the country.
Decisions such as the hiring of a former general manager of Metropolitan Parks and Markets (MPM) known to be close to the governing People's National Party (PNP) to be in charge of the Portmore garbage collection zone, without the benefit of the contract being put to tender.
That and other contracts, according to Mr. Stewart, have not been part of a formal bidding process simply because there has been no such system in place for most of the history of the parks and markets agencies and their successor, the NSWMA. A situation which, he says, he has been trying to change.
They were not adopted,
according to Mr. Stewart, simply because "The nuances relative to the solid waste sector were not in the guidelines they had in the construction sub-sector and so there were a number of areas in which they said they could not make informed pronouncements".
It was against that background, he said, that a few new contractors, including the former general
manager, were brought into the system. Portmore, he said, had been a particularly difficult zone, as a result of which he asked the very experienced former executive to take on the challenge.
"And she has been doing an excellent job. The calls and complaints from that Portmore zone, which is large and complex, have dropped by at least 90 per cent", he said.
