Here are my suggestions, Ms Joseph

THE EDITOR: Open letter to letter writer Lynette Joseph.

I would like to offer some answers to questions you posed recently in the newspaper.

I have read most if not all of your letters and I have to ask if you are a party card holder or just an over-protective person? Such behaviour makes one myopic.

Let me offer a few suggestions.

First, we do not get free water and electricity and those are not paid from taxes. You may say we subsidise the Government's provision of those services.

Next, we have been blessed with resources which other Caribbean islands do not have, yet they manage to keep their countries in better condition than ours. I am referring to the most famous pitch lake in the world and our oil reserves.

Revenue from those two should be sufficient to run our small nation and still have a surplus. However, over the years successive governments have misused that revenue source. They have fallen in love with the word "billion."

We have at our disposal an almost endless supply of asphalt yet our roads – and repairs to them – cost so much. In addition, there is the road tax which was introduced, I believe, back in the 1970s. It is collected on every gallon of automotive gasoline sold.

You lived abroad for a while so you must have seen how First World countries do things. They do not use CEPEP gangs to clean streets, they use mechanical sweepers. This was tried back in the 1970s. The government imported one mechanical sweeper and it spent its entire life sweeping one street, Dock Road, because the Licensing Office refused to licence it as it was not right-hand drive.

Think of the millions or even billions that could be saved by furnishing each division with one or two of those sweepers – and the speed at which the divisions would be cleaned.

Similarly, riding mowers or brush-cutting tractors for the highway verges would also save time and money.

These are just a few suggestions. It is not just a matter of collecting revenue, but the way it is used.

RICHARD DEANE

Diego Martin