EDITORIAL - If the KSAC can only stay awake

It is not often that Jamaica's local government authorities, including the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC), do significant and sustainable things that advance the welfare of the communities over which they preside.

The capital, for instance, is, for the most part, shambolic. Verges are overgrown. Drains are uncleaned. People vend anywhere, and zoning regulations are mostly unenforced.

In other words, Kingston is a free-for-all, despite the spasmodic eruptions into righteous indignation about the sorry state of affairs by the corporation's chairman and Kingston's mayor, Mr Desmond McKenzie.

Mr McKenzie, however, is into one of those bouts of bubbled energy, which we hope he will sustain longer than his period of irrigated excitement, and during which we hope that he can accomplish something substantial for the city. He has finally been able to tear down a few buildings that were constructed without permits, or violated the terms of those that were issued, posing danger to the community.

Demolition campaign halted

For instance, a fortnight ago, a 44-room apartment, built on the approval for a two-bedroom home, was demolished at Coleyville Avenue, Kingston 20. And just before that, the KSAC got around to taking down a building on South Avenue, Kingston 5, which violated the Town and Country Planning Act, and which the courts had long given the authorities the right to tear down.

But those two buildings are not the only two in the Greater Kingston area that breach building codes and zone laws, for which the KSAC has the legal green light to proceed.

However, the town clerk, the KSAC's top non-political executive, said at an Editors' Forum hosted by this newspaper that the campaign against such lawbreakers has been put on hold while the corporation calculates the cost of proceeding.

"You can't just go in like that," said Mr Errol Greene. "You have to mobilise and put equipment in place."

It seems that people in the KSAC count slowly and are not good at mobilising anyone or anything, the latter of which we have no doubt.

Incompetence or impotence?

Normally, it is his boss, Mayor McKenzie, who is in this role, but Mr Greene himself has raised additional concerns about the competence of the KSAC. He spoke about a building at University Grove in St Andrew, whose owner has appealed a lower-court decision that it be demolished.

The developer apparently completed the building despite numerous stop orders issued by the KSAC. "Even when the building was about 80 per cent complete, we were still serving him with notices, and he still went through with it," said the town clerk.

With that admission, the force of the law on their side and the security apparatus of the State at their disposal, we wonder whether either Mr Greene or Mr McKenzie expects anyone to repose confidence in the city's managers.

We, nonetheless, still hope that this lot might be able to bring a semblance of order to a city being overtaken by grit, grime, decay, disorder and disrespect for laws and regulations. In the meantime, therefore, we back the KSAC's new effort to have people comply with building codes and hope that Mayor McKenzie will not have forgotten what the project was about by the time the corporation's six-week amnesty for those who are outside the law is complete.

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