FAISALABAD, June 3: The Tehsil Municipal Administration (city) has decided to appoint coordinators for all its wings for what its Nazim claims to run the affairs smoothly and effectively.

According to a TMA source, the members belonging to the opposition group had defeated the ruling group by winning five important seats of the chairmen of standing committees.

This development, in fact, forced city Nazim Mumtaz Ali Cheema and his allies to make the standing committees ineffective by resorting to various tactics. Through a fresh move, the TMA ruling group decided to appoint coordinators belonging to their group.

The opposition councillors claimed that the ruling group instead of delegating formal powers to elected chairmen of the standing committees had evolved a novel strategy to control the TMA affairs and decided to nominate 31 favourites as coordinators of its different wings like store, finance, infrastructure and services, health, land, building, garden, light, engineering, births and deaths, sports and culture, minority affairs and taxation.

The source said the step to appoint coordinators was not only a move to weaken the position of the opposition group, but also a plan to stop the no-confidence move against the city Nazim.

The city Nazim had refused to allocate offices to standing committee chairmen fearing problems from them to run the affairs unilaterally. But the opposition members occupied the offices on their own which were, however, got vacated by the Nazim. This tussle has been going on for the last couple of months. The fresh move of the ruling group to appoint coordinators would open a Pandora’s box at the cost of official working.

The opposition leader in the TMA, Chaudhry Mohammed Ashraf, in a statement on Tuesday, announced that he would move the court as well as other appropriate fora against the TMA decision to appoint coordinators.

He urged the Punjab governor and the chief minister to take notice of the ‘illegal’ steps taken by the city Nazim.

toll: The district government has decided to award contracts to private companies for the collection of toll on 14 main roads of different tehsils.

Sources said on Tuesday that special instructions had been issued by District Nazim Zahid Nazir to the officials concerned for taking steps to generate income through different sources as the local government had been facing a serious financial crunch since its inception.

In the light of these instructions, the district government announced a couple of months ago to levy a heavy toll on five main city roads — Canal Road, Jhang Road, Samundri Road, Satiana Road and Jaranwala Road — but the plan was bounced back by the district government councillors when they refused to pass the same during a session of the district council.

The district government in a fresh move invited tenders for imposing toll on 14 roads of Samundri Tehsil, Chak Jhumra, Tandlianwala and Jaranwala for generating Rs25 million.