FALMOUTH, Trelawny — Already grappling with raw sewage on the streets of Falmouth when it rains, the city’s local authorities are now faced with some residents using the gardens of the municipal corporation as a toilet. The result, complained a frustrated Mayor C Junior Gager, is the stomach-turning sight and foul stench of human waste.

“Sometimes we feel so down and depressed when we come out and we see some of the things that is there,” said Gager during a mayor’s forum he hosted in the town Wednesday night.

“We are asking you to make use of the sanitary convenience. Let us stay away from using the gardens of the municipal corporation as a bathroom,” he stressed in his appeal to residents.

He also reminded them that there is public toilet just a few metres away and the cost to use it is minimal.

The mayor is adamant that behavioural change is needed.

“It can’t be I want to urinate and I just go beside a building, I just go beside a tree, I just go beside a street; and so when you pass, that aroma, we have to call it, that is coming from the corners isn’t a pleasant one,” he bemoaned.

He and his team, he said, have been doing all they can to spare locals and the tourists that visit from the unpleasantness. However, it has been time consuming.

“We have to be begging sanitary stuff so that we can use these to get the town clean,” he said.

The mayor also had a tongue-lashing for vendors who he said contribute to the litter in the town.

“You can’t, when you come out and you sell the fry chicken, just dump all of the leftover flour at the root of the flowers, or the dumping of the oil,” he scolded, adding that cleaning the town “costs a pretty penny”.

Falmouth has for years grappled with the stench from sewage that runs along some of its roads whenever it rains. Even when the effluent is washed away, the stench still lingers. As Jamaica Observer West reported in May, Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett has expressed concern about the impact on the sector as well as locals who have to live with what he called an “untenable” situation. Mayor Gager said, then, that a committee has been set up to address the issue and the local government ministry had provided $4 million in financing.