Kathmandu: Mayors and deputy mayors from across Kathmandu Valley have decided to seek an urgent meeting with Prime Minister Balendra Shah to raise concerns about waste management and other pressing local issues.

The decision came from an emergency meeting of the Kathmandu Valley Mayors Forum, a joint body representing chiefs and deputy chiefs of all local governments in the valley, including municipality and rural municipality leaders.

The forum agreed to arrange the meeting with the Prime Minister as soon as possible. Topics on the table include waste management in the valley, fees for street lighting, land rights over property currently used by local governments and land needed to manage waste going forward.

Members also raised strong objections to how Member of Parliament Ashika Tamang treated forum officials and members during a waste management meeting held at Singha Durbar on Bhadra 5. The forum said this incident, too, will be brought up when they meet the Prime Minister.

According to the forum, discussions on the valley’s waste problem have been going on since Balendra Shah’s time as mayor of Kathmandu Metropolitan City. One unresolved question keeps coming up in these meetings: whether to move forward with the agreement the previous government signed with Nepwaste to First, or scrap it and look for a new way to handle waste.

The forum stated that waste management concerns all three levels of government, federal, provincial and local and that local governments remain committed to finding a long term fix. Its conclusion was that effective coordination between the federal, provincial and local levels is necessary to make waste management sustainable going forward.