Editorial | Councils need ambition

Now that the councils are mostly in place after last month’s municipal elections, they must get about their jobs with a sense of urgency and new levels of transparency if they are keen on salvaging respect and support for the system of local government.

While important for their delivery of services, talk of money, or the lack of it, isn’t the most immediate issue if the councils are to chart this new course. Three things are of greater urgency:

First, the leaders of the local government authorities must have ambition, that is a large sense of mission for the municipal corporations over which they preside. And they should have the ability to transmit these ideals to their members, across the political divide.

Put another way, the leaders and individual councillors must either insist the political parties liberate them to be genuine representatives of their divisions, or they must find the will to extricate themselves from vassalship to the members of Parliament of their party in whose constituencies their divisions fall.

Second, the municipal authorities need merely to follow the law. There is plenty in the Local Governance Act and the Local Government (Financial and Management) Act of 2016 to empower ambitious councils, while affording them opportunities to build the trust with citizens. The councils have, for the most part, failed to utilise them.

The third point is that the councils – other than those required in law, which are mostly honoured in the breach – can do things on their own initiative to enhance transparency, such as those promised by the People’s National Party (PNP) in its recent ‘manifesto’. Among them was a pledge that councils controlled by its members will publish annual budgets in the electronic, print and social media, and that their chairmen and CEOs will hold quarterly press briefings to report on their programmes and projects.

UP-TO-DATE WEBSITES

The Gleaner, in this regard, repeats its suggestion that all municipal bodies should maintain active up-to-date websites with information pertinent to the residents of their jurisdictions, and via which applicants for services, such as building permits, can track their progress through the decision-making process. Such sites not hard, or overly expensive, to design, launch and maintain.

Apart from fees they collect from local charges, municipal corporations are funded from their entitlement to 90 per cent of the property taxes and a quarter of motor vehicle licence fees collected by the national government in the respective parishes. The remaining 10 per cent of the property taxes is distributed to the authorities by the minister, according to need.

In October, before the start of the financial year the following April, the municipalities are supposed to prepare, and submit to the local government minister, strategic plans and budgets for approval.

But the Local Government (Finance and Financial Management) Act says: “Prior to submitting any strategic plan and budget for approval … the relevant local authority shall ensure that the public is given an opportunity to consider and give feedback on the draft of the strategic plan and budget proposed to be submitted…”

Separately, the Local Governance Act, which sets out the structure of the local government system, obliges each council to “conduct community meetings at least once in each year to report to the local authority’s inhabitants on the local authority’s performance and plans”.

These requirements for community engagement are not voluntary options. They are legal obligations. However, they are not often, if ever, fulfilled.

Citizens, after pledges from all sides, or a new era of transparency, should monitor the councils for compliance with the law, and perhaps sue for specific performance when they fail to do so.

CONSISTENTLY FLOUTED

The failure to consult citizens on their budgets isn’t the only area where the law, if not consistently flouted by municipal councils, is, at best, observed only in passing.

For example, the local government bodies make sparse use – as proposed by the law – of local stakeholder institutions, such as the private sector civil society organisations, as well the parish and community development committees established by the government Social Development Commission (SDC) in their community engagement.

Neither do they regularly use their ability to invite non-elected people with relevant expertise, to serve on their committees, but without the right to vote. Two of those committees, the Finance Committee and the Local Public Accounts Committee (LPAC), must have outside members, despite wiggle room with respect to the numbers. In the case of the LPACs, which are supposed to review the integrity with which the councils manage their fiduciary obligations, the chairmen are supposed to be non-council members, nominated by parish development committees.

It remains unclear how many of the councils activated these committees in accordance with the structures outlined in the law. If any were in place, they, sadly, weren’t heard from or about.

Notably, Richard Vernon, the new, youthful chairman of the St James Municipal Corporation, has promised to resuscitate that municipality’s LPAC. The others should follow suit.

The bottom line: if the local government authorities fulfil the basic requirements of the law, they are likely to win the support and respect of the citizens. And once taken seriously, they will have strength not only to advocate on behalf of their municipalities but to promote their jurisdictions as places where Jamaicans should want to live, raise families and do business.

First, though, the leaders and the councillors must demonstrate that they possess ambition, and they are willing to pursue something bigger than imposed vassalage.