Open municipal committees to other citizens

IT IS pleasing that Delroy Williams, chairman of the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC), the parish’s local government, is not yet tired of the efforts to clean up the arrangements for approving construction in the city.

This week, at the monthly meeting of the KSAMC’s council, Mayor Williams announced tweaks to ensure better verification project submissions and approvals by the council’s building committee. So, at each meeting of the council, the KSAMC’s CEO will have to report on the number of projects approved for the relevant period, based on data provided by the corporation’s chief engineer and its planning department.

As was the case last month, when Mr Williams ordered that the chief engineer produce regular reports on the number of construction projects taking place in the KSAMC, and that a minimum number of inspections have to take place at each of these sites, we are flabbergasted that the new measures were not the normal way the corporation did these things. That, simply, is management accountability.

SAYS FAR MORE

By applying Band-Aid here and poking a finger in a hole there, Mr Williams says far more than he verbalises. And it is the same thing, we suspect, that Supreme Court Judge Natalie Hart-Hines bared in that scathing Christmastime indictment of construction oversight by the KSAMC and the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA). She alluded to Hamlet’s rank Denmark.

While we welcome the raft of initiatives he has so far initiated to deal with the problem, if Mayor Williams is permanently excising the rot, he should also make fuller use of other tools available to the corporation, which cost him nothing and can be applied in other aspects of the management of the municipal government. That is, a good dose of transparency and citizens ’involvement and oversight. In fact, it is a prescription that we recommend to all the local governments.

Under Section 37 of the Local Governance Act, which sets out the roles and functions of the local government apparatus, a municipal council can appoint committees to which it can delegate” in whole or in part … areas within its jurisdiction”. The building committee is one of these bodies.

Section 37 (4) of the legislation says: “A committee appointed under this section may include persons who are not members of the council, but at least two-thirds of the members … of every committee shall be members of the council.” Whether committee members who are not elected members of councils have an automatic right to vote is not specifically addressed. But it might be assumed that right exists, given that other sections of the law specifically preclude this right to noncouncil members of certain standings committees, notwithstanding that membership of this category of persons is obligatory.

The arrangement for the citizen member makes sense. It helps to fulfil the ideal of bringing local government closer to the people.

The KSAMC does have non-council members on its building committee. They, however, are primarily representatives of regulatory-type bodies, plus a few people with sector-specific skills. This is good. It provides some level of independent oversight of the approval process.

While we do not claim it to be the case with the KSAMC’s building committee, or any of the corporation’s committees, it is often the case that when groups of professionals who speak the same jargon sit together, they tend to coalesce into brotherhood. Others become outsiders and aliens. They are wont to quickly circle the wagons on the presumption of threat.

REVAMP BUILDING COMMITTEE

Mayor Williams, therefore, should, as part of a new thrust for transparency and accountability, revamp the building committee. Suitably knowledgeable, activist citizens should be invited to sit on, or to apply for membership of, the committee. Given that the council has the authority to structure these committees, these persons could not easily prevent them from making decisions or granting approvals. They would not gum up the works.

However, they would represent independent voices, ears and eyes of reason – and of the people, not beholden to professional, political or similar interests. They would be expected to speak their minds, and the truth, to the public.

But citizens, too, can act independently on this front. The default position of the Local Governance Act is for meetings of committees to be open, except, according to Section 34 (1) of the law, in circumstances “having regard to any public interest in restricting access to the public due to confidentiality or sensitive information”. Citizens and their organisations might find it is in their individual and the community’s interests to attend these meetings. Perhaps, also, the Public Broadcasting Corporation of Jamaica, working with local television channels, might figure out ways to live-stream these sessions to the wider public.