estern Bureau: The floundering Greater Montego Bay Redevelopment Company (GMRC) lost yet another member as prominent businessman and land surveyor, Winston Dear, threw in the towel.

“Right now GMRC, to me, has no relevance. I don’t like being part of a failure. And GMRC, to me, certainly has the ingredients of becoming a failure,” Dear told the Observer Thursday.

Dear’s decision to “have nothing more to do” with the company comes at a time when there is a new move to revive the organisation and get its Plan 2014 to become a development order.

Over the past decade, the GMRC has attempted to formulate, and have accepted, this plan, which proposes to bring about the orderly development and expansion of the western city. However, the GMRC has had a hard time getting its Plan 2014 accepted by government technocrats. Apparently, Dear also feels that the current plan was grossly inadequate. In fact, he told the Observer that the plan’s shortcomings will hamper any further progress in moving the document forward, and in getting much-needed international funding.

“In my opinion, the GMRC has lost the opportunity when the private sector of Jamaica was willing to fund it. It’s been dragged out too long,” he said. “I had suggested that we amalgamate with the PDC and use local government funding to provide the management capabilities and technical planning skills necessary.”

In the minutes of its May 24th meeting, the GMRC acceded that there was work to be done on the plan before it could become a development order. But on Thursday, Dear charged that the GMRC’s insistence on getting the plan to that stage was like flogging a dead horse. And while he made it clear that aspects of the plan could be implemented, he suggested that the GMRC recognise that they had lost this battle.

“They should stop flogging the issue of the plan itself because it has a lot of technical defects that prevent it, in its present state, from being a development order,” he said. “For example, it refers to districting which has no relation to the political and parish regulations under local government regulations. For a development order to refer to districting, which has no legal description in our laws, means the local government laws would have to be changed to accommodate the plan. The plan has to be rewritten in a way that conforms to our own local laws and also in a more understandable language to the technocrats who have to use it,” Dear stressed.

It is not clear whether the other GMRC members who threw in the towel before Dear felt the same way about the plan. But for the past few years, the body has all but dissolved as disenchanted members fell by the wayside. In fact, chairman Noel Sloley has repeatedly tried to resign, but the few remaining members will not accept his resignation. The body has also met infrequently over the past two years. However, at the June 7 meeting, discussions focused primarily on the relevance and role of the GMRC, in light of the recently established statutory body, the Parish Development Committee.