By: Mama A. Touray
The Chairman of the Brikama Area Council, Yankuba Darboe, said in an interview that the BAC has started a property assessment to determine the number of properties within the West Coast Region, as the council does not have a database of properties within its jurisdiction.
“We started a property assessment at the council. BAC does not have a database, so when you say, for example, at Bijilo, we don’t know how many properties are there. The collector that goes to Bijilo may say we have collected from ten compounds, but he can even collect from a hundred compounds and report only ten because we don’t know the number of properties there,” Darboe explained.
He alleged that, at times during the year, collectors would again tell the council that they had exhausted all the properties in a given area.
According to Chairman Darboe, this behavior by collectors is one of the reasons BAC often refers to a “limping period” and resorts to taking loans from banks to pay staff salaries.
“This is what collectors do. It’s why most of our collectors have multi-story buildings built in their names, and this is the reality,” he said.
He added, “So what we have done is to assess all areas and determine how many households are in Bijilo and how much they should pay in a year. This will help us in budgeting and knowing how many shops and businesses are there.”
Chairman Darboe, however, lamented that although they hired an assessment team, the collectors are not allowing them to do their work. “The collectors don’t want us to have the information because information is power, so they don’t want us to know, and they are not collecting from everywhere.”
He continued, noting that when the assessment team visits some places, residents report they have never seen BAC officials collecting from them since they began occupying the property. He added that even the NAMs in Jabang have never paid anything to BAC since they acquired their properties. “All the NAMs in Jabang have never paid anything to BAC because none of our collectors reached them, but this year, our assessment team did.”
Darboe stated that BAC has many development goals for the West Coast Region, but without tax payments, they cannot achieve them.
“All those who were at BAC before us did nothing for us. They left it for us, so we have our work cut out for us. This year, we are dedicating efforts to acquiring trucks because we know that will help us address the issue of trash, which is a very big problem in the West Coast Region, and this is the reality,” he concluded.
