Editorial | Widen the Portmore debate

As we indicated more than a month ago, this newspaper welcomes the debate that has been triggered by the Government’s move to fulfil its manifesto promise of separating the municipality of Portmore from the parish of St Catherine and establish it as a parish in its own right. The effect would be to make Portmore, a sprawling community with a population of around 200,000, Jamaica’s 15th parish and 14th parochial government.

We appreciated the speed with which the administration moved on this matter after the September election. That ought to be the standard for all policy pledges – at least the good ones – although there is a suspicion that in this case, the urgency has something to do with the municipal elections that were to be held early next year, but have been delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Whenever that poll is held, with a spun-off Portmore it would mean that its 12 councillors would not, any longer, sit in the St Catherine Municipal Corporation, presumably giving an advantage to the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

ADVANTAGES AND BENEFITS

Political calculus, in this situation, is secondary to the questions about the advantages and benefits, if any, that would accrue to the citizens of Portmore if their community were declared a parish, rather than continuing as a city municipality, as its designation under the Local Governance Act of 2016. Such questions are to be resolved, primarily by the residents of Portmore, on the basis of facts, rather than conjecture. Which, in part, is why we took issue with Fitz Jackson, an opposition MP with a portion of his constituency encompassing several communities in Portmore, for attempting to short-circuit the discussions, even before they began. He, a priori, declared that there was no value to Portmore becoming a parish.

Whatever may be the merits, or otherwise, of Mr Jackson’s argument, which we infer has something to do with the (un)availability of resources, his posture, and the fact that there is a parliamentary select committee review of the proposal, provides an opportunity for another look on the structure, operations and viability of Jamaica’s local government system. The parliamentary committee’s terms of reference should be revised and expanded.

We are aware that Jamaicans who follow these matters may be suffering from local government reform fatigue. The fact is that after decades of going at it, what has been delivered by the consultants and assorted experts haven’t quite worked. Citizens do not believe that the municipal corporations – they used to be called authorities and parish councils – deliver the services they are mandated to provide, such as maintaining community roads, grooming verges, ensuring covenants are respected, and so on.

There are three options: continue to muddle along, pack them in; or have another shot at getting the local government apparatus right.

FUNDING

Part of the problem is that, apart from the inability of municipal politics to attract good talent (which has something to do with how the political parties have, in recent decades, positioned the local government systems and its representatives), they often do not have the money to do the job. The corporations are funded mostly from two-thirds of the property taxes collected by the central government and a quarter of its take from motor vehicle licences, and whatever other pickings they make from fees charged for regulatory and other services. With respect to the portion of the property and motor vehicle taxes allocated to local government, that money goes into a central fund, from which 90 per cent is paid out each month. The remaining 10 per cent is held in reserve, to be distributed on the basis of requests to the local government minister by the corporations, but subject to availability. The corporations have no capacity to levy their own taxes, or to offer incentives so as to, say, compete with each other for other forms of investment, or development capital.

Issues such as these, and how they might be resolved, ought, perhaps, to be part of the agenda with respect to Portmore and the broader discourse that we now propose. For example, the committee might consider, and open for wider debate, a suggestion by Arnold Bertram, some two decades ago when he was the local government minister, of collapsing a number of councils into each other to create fewer (there are now 13 corporations plus the Portmore municipality), geographically larger regional bodies. This, it was contended at the time, would allow for economies of scale and the possibility of the corporations collecting more money to finance their operations.