SOME three months ago residents in one section of Arima woke up to the fact that a private contracting firm was handling the garbage collection and disposal service provided for decades by the borough itself. They didn’t like it, not that anything was wrong with the private service. They had just gotten used to the workers and the trucks with the blue and gold of the borough.

Whereas the borough service operated during the hours just before dawn, in most areas on most days, the new bright blue trucks of the contractor come along a little later in the morning. Maybe the burgesses preferred to have their garbage taken away before sunlight. They wanted the borough service back.

Residents signed petitions calling for this, but so far, the borough has not reversed itself on the issue. The matter in fact reached some of the members of the borough council, but not ultimately the mayor.

What burgesses in some of the borough’s seven electoral districts may not have known, however, is that while some of them got this service every day, Monday to Friday, others got it only three days a week. With the new arrangements, everybody has their garbage collected every day, Monday to Friday.

The garbage petition is just one of the initiatives being mounted by people in many parts of the borough which proudly carries the title as the only Royal Chartered Borough in the Commonwealth Caribbean.

Whether it is the interminable debate about leaving the Arima market in place where it is or moving to another location, the increasing problems with parking, with the absence of public facilities, with crime and vagrancy or with inadequate space for street vendors, including arts and crafts people, Arimians are loaded with issues.

Some of those have been coming to the fore again in the last couple weeks, with another visit to Trinidad and Tobago by Queen Elizabeth II for next week’s Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. Some residents feel convinced she won’t be happy with what she might see were she and her entourage to pay a visit to the Royal Borough.

Adrian Cabralis, the current mayor, may well have no dispute with such sentiments. He too, wants to see big changes in many areas. To hear him tell it, it is the pace at which things get done. It is also, he has been finding out, the challenge of harmonising disparate and often competing interests of different stakeholders.

No less than three sets of consultants and advisers have been engaged in a council decision to transform the look and the feel of the borough’s central district, including the heartbeat area around the market and including the Velodrome and the bus terminus.

’We are clear in our minds that that area must be commercialised,’ Mayor Cabralis said this week, in discussing the council’s plans for beautification, for modernisation and for enhancing this area to the benefit of all who use it now for commercial and business, as well as leisure and recreational activity.

Arts and craft vendors fear the council wants to move them out of some rundown booths they now occupy at the back of the market, and put them in tents, taking away the sense of permanence, and of entitlement they now possess.

Mayor Cabralis says that’s not what is on the cards. The plan is to enhance the look and the feel of where they now are. Dislocation is not on.

Where other burgesses complain about an absence of public facilities, he points to four in existence, yards away from one another, along this very strip (at the market, the basketball court, the tennis court and at the Velodrome). Where the one at the market is decidedly uninviting, the three others are either unknown or seen as off-limits even to regulars, much more to visitors whom the borough want to be able to attract in larger numbers.

Included in what is referred to as Phase III of Arima’s own promenade project, are plans for more accessible public facilities.

Nothing acceptable can be found to placate those residents who object to the fact that salt meat vendors have been operating under tents on a portion of the sidewalk around the market building while renovations to their stalls inside have been stalled.

Their belief is that when the work is completed those vendors may well consider the disadvantages of going back inside. Sales have been brisker, and the authorised hours longer, on the sidewalk.

On the face of it, this is a tinymite among some of the issues with which the council finds itself having to treat with. ’The idea is not to seek to battle,’ this mayor offers as his motto.

From the point of view of some residents, however, there are at least a few battles which must be waged, if they are to get what they insist the want.

Included among these are the continuing calls for a proper hospital in Arima. For adequate parking space. For more effective cleaning and sanitation services on the streets.