Pay up

Competent Authority appeals to city dwellers:

Lakshmi de Silva

CMC Competent Authority Omar Kamil appeals to the city dwellers and Government institutions who are receiving the Council’s services to make their payments to help the CMC in its effort to make the city a beautiful place.

CMC has already started a 100-day program to make the Colombo city a better place. Garbage is cleared from households more efficiently and regularly under strict supervision.

Unfortunately during the past years the services deteriorated but things are now changing for the better,” Kamil said.

“Through my experience as a former Mayor and a councilor for more than two decades at the Colombo Municipal Council I have seen that payment of rates gets into arrears when the services deteriorate and that is why there is a large backlog of rates and taxes in arrears.

Therefore, it is my intention to provide an efficient service to the rate payers first and then call upon them to pay taxes before taking the next step of enforcement,” he further said.

According to him, then the rate payers would pay more willingly than in the past and this has been his previous experience. “Rome was not built in one day.

The CMC’s top and middle management together with our workforce are working round the clock to bring the Colombo city back to the levels of what we saw many years ago. But unless the public join hands and cooperate with us our efforts would be fruitless.

Therefore, we solicit the support of the city dwellers to extend their hand in making Colombo a better city,” he said.

“The CMC’s revenue inspectors are now personally meeting with the defaulters and are collecting the taxes, but not using the stick, instead we are using the carrot,” Kamil said.