The Kingstown Town Board on Wednesday announced via social media that vending on two streets of the capital must end three days later, on Saturday, Sept. 12.
The announcement took vendors and members of the public by surprise, given the short notice and the New Democratic Party (NDP) administration’s policy, as reiterated by Prime Minister Godwin Friday on March 6 — 100 days after the party came to office.
On Friday, the KTB announced via the same platform that the planned removal of vendors has been “stayed until further notice”.
Deputy Prime Minister St. Clair Leacock, who is also MP for Central Kingstown, which includes the city, commented on the announcement on Facebook, saying:
“It’s not a pause Sir!!! It’s a firm Halt awaiting our comprehensive plan fir d remaining n refurbishing of Kingstown. Vendors have a special place in our hearts and with proper consultation a central role n our developmental plans. Stay tuned”.
The development has raised questions about whether there is a disconnect between the management of the KTB, whose acting warden is Noel Dickson –– the NDP’s south windward candidate in the 2015 and 2020 election –– and the central government’s policy.
In the March 6 interview with Hot 97 FM, Friday framed his government’s task in Kingstown not as a war on vendors, but as part of a larger effort to make the capital “more livable”.
He presented a vision of Kingstown as a city where people would want to linger, not just rush through, and where the entrepreneurial energy of small traders could be organised rather than pushed aside.
The prime minister had argued that the starting point had to be respect for the people who line the streets with stalls and makeshift stands.
“People see vending as a problem,” Friday said. “I see vendors as people who are looking for work.”
They are, he has insisted, “some of the most … driven, entrepreneurial people, driven people,” and the responsibility of government was to “use that spirit… give them incentive to do it in a way that is productive for them and for the country, because it’s an important part of the economy – with structure, with structure”.
He had described Kingstown as “a little rough around the edge”, with drainage, pedestrian spaces and “the vending” all needing attention.
However, the prime minister sketched a vision of Kingstown that began with human presence rather than prohibition.
Kingstown, he had suggested, needed to be reimagined as a place where people live and care about their surroundings, not just a daytime commercial hub that empties at 4 p.m.
“You have to reimagine Kingstown as a city,” Friday said. “We have to get people to live in Kingstown again. When people live in a space, they care about it.”
On July 21, 2025, Friday, the then-opposition leader linked that same argument directly to the stubborn realities of unemployment and survival.
Vending, he said, was often a last resort for people who “have to find a way to make a living” in an economy that cannot absorb all who want work.
“People think that vending is so easy,” he said. “These are people who are trying to make a living.”
The task was to “incorporate them into the formal economy, and to find a way in which to deal with this as a phenomenon of our economy,” rather than treating them as a nuisance to be swept away.
The then opposition leader’s message was that Kingstown needed to be cleaned up and made safer and more attractive, but vendors were not to be cast as the enemy. They were to be partners in a reordered, more structured city.
That framing was put to an immediate and very public test this week when the KTB issued a one-page notice announcing a “vending cleanup mandate”.
The notice from Dickson advised vendors and the general public that, from Saturday, Sept. 12, “vending will no longer be permitted on Bedford Street, Bay Street, and surrounding areas, including the sidewalks”.
Vendors operating in those areas were told to “return to their respective market stalls or apply for a stall at a designated market.”
The KTB described the move as part of its “ongoing efforts to maintain a clean, safe, orderly, and accessible Kingstown” and asked all vendors to comply and “make the necessary arrangements before the effective date,” thanking them and the public in advance for their cooperation.
Dozens of vendors were being told they would no longer be allowed to trade along the streets and were being funnelled instead into existing or prospective market spaces.
Within 48 hours, however, that hard line began to bend.
On Friday, the KTB said it had “heard the concerns and representations raised by stakeholders” following the earlier announcement.
After considering those representations, the KTB advised that implementation of the scheduled measures “will be stayed until further notice” to allow “further consultation and engagement with affected stakeholders”.
The KTB acknowledged “the important contribution vendors make to our local economy, and the role vending plays in supporting the livelihoods of many Vincentian families.”
Any effort to improve how Kingstown is managed, it said, “must therefore be undertaken in a manner that takes these realities into account”.
In those three days, the KTB notices sketched out, in miniature, the tensions that have shaped the vending debate in Kingstown for more than a decade.
That debate long predates the NDP government.
Under the Unity Labour Party (ULP) government, which was voted out of office in November, then minister of local government Senator Julian Francis became the leading voice for a cleanup drive that cast vending as a threat to the city’s functioning.
In his various public comments, the senator portrayed Kingstown as almost overwhelmed by informal trade.
“It is bad. It is terrible,” he said in June 2022, complaining that “everybody wants to do what he or she thinks is right,” packing boots, sneakers, cologne and fruit into a suitcase, “jump[ing] in a van” and setting up wherever a space could be found.
Francis accused vendors of helping to destroy what little parking existed in the capital, describing how a single stallholder might use “two or three parking spaces” by parking a van, raising the back door on blocks and spilling goods onto the street.
Francis grounded his case in numbers. The KTV, he said, had identified between 750 and 900 vendors in the capital, with roughly 600 already classified by name, location, origin and type of goods sold.
He spoke of three market sites, including the old customs warehouse opposite CK Greaves on Upper Bay Street and rehabilitated buildings near the vegetable and fish markets, where some 270 stalls were prepared to accommodate vendors and “definitely reduce the congestion on the sidewalks and on the streets of Kingstown”.
Some 800 vendors were removed from the streets of the capital in November 2022, after the then-ULP government opened two markets in the city.
“… by the 29th of November 2022, all the streets will be cleared of informal street vending,” then-prime minister Ralph Gonsalves had said at the opening of one of the markets.