San Juan mar­ket ven­dors have giv­en San Juan/Laven­tille Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion chair­man An­tho­ny Roberts sev­en days to re­fund their rental fees or face the courts.

The ven­dors, through their at­tor­ney Ger­ald Ramdeen, are threat­en­ing le­gal ac­tion against the cor­po­ra­tion over a pro­pos­al to in­crease rental fees for stalls.

Ramdeen and Pun­dit Satyanand Ma­haraj, pres­i­dent of the Aranguez Unit­ed Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, held a press con­fer­ence at the San Juan mar­ket yes­ter­day, sur­round­ed by plac­ard car­ry­ing ven­dors.

“The San Juan ven­dors have been charged over a num­ber of years a fee for the rental of their stalls that is in ex­cess of what the law pre­scribes should be charged,” Ramdeen said.

“We’ve gone and done some back­ground re­search be­fore we came here to­day. In every oth­er mar­ket in the coun­try, whether it’s Siparia, Pe­nal, Debe, Moru­ga, Cou­va, Ma­yaro, Tu­na­puna, Ari­ma, all mar­kets com­ply with what the law pre­scribes which is the Mar­ket By-Laws of 1996. One has to won­der why there have been no new by-laws for San Juan Laven­tille and the San Juan mar­ket.”

He said the ven­dors’ rent was al­most ten times what was pre­scribed by the law. He added that the cat­a­lyst for the ven­dors’ ac­tion was a plan by the mar­ket ad­min­is­tra­tion to in­crease stall rental fees from $400 to $800 and $800 to $1600.

Ramdeen said he wrote to Roberts on Au­gust 1 on be­half of 99 ven­dors at the San Juan Pub­lic Mar­ket and gave him sev­en days to state whether he will re­pay the ex­cess rental fees they have paid since 2017. He said any in­crease in rates had to be done by Par­lia­ment via sub­sidiary leg­is­la­tion un­der the Re­gion­al Mu­nic­i­pal Cor­po­ra­tion Act.

Ven­dors list­ed a litany of prob­lems at the mar­ket. Nan­dra Per­manand com­plained that there are toi­lets in every build­ing, but on­ly one is open dai­ly, fans do not work prop­er­ly, there are wa­ter prob­lems and in­ad­e­quate park­ing for ven­dors and cus­tomers.  

An­nette Fran­cis-Good­ing said ven­dors had to pay $2 to use the mar­ket’s toi­let fa­cil­i­ties and they are hard-pressed to make $300 a day. The roof leaks when it rains and the light­ing is poor.

They al­so com­plained that ven­dors sell­ing il­le­gal­ly on the streets had the un­fair ad­van­tage of not hav­ing to pay high rental fees.