MORE than six weeks after a five-member board for the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation Markets Company Ltd was named, it has still not met because one of the members is still to be confirmed.

Town Clerk Errol Greene said yesterday that the corporation wanted the board to meet as soon as possible but that he was still waiting on one person to be confirmed. He, however, declined to say which member was still to be confirmed.

“We want a meeting as soon as possible but the board members are business people and have been busy,” Greene told the Observer.

The company was set up last November by Prime Minister P J Patterson, to oversee the operations of markets in downtown Kingston after merchants threatened to lock down their businesses for two days, if order was not brought to street vending, traffic congestion and infrastructural decay generally in the business district.

The government subsequently allocated $22 million to refurbish the downtown markets in which the KSAC was to relocate vendors and it was announced that the markets company was to be set up.

However, when the KSAC met on November 13, to appoint the board, Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) councillor for the Tivoli Gardens division, Desmond McKenzie, led a walk-out of his colleague councillors in protest over what they claimed was the naming of two Peoples National Party (PNP) activists to the five-member board.

Gassan Azan, CEO of Bashco Limited was appointed as chairman of the board and the other members appointed were Maureen Webber, CEO of Development Options Limited; Dunstan Whittingham, nominee of the Vendors’ Association; Robert Stephenson, senior officer in the Commercial Services Unit at the local government ministry and Errol Greene, town clerk.

But McKenzie said that the appointments of Webber and Stephenson breached an agreement among members of the consultative committee to exempt from the board, persons with political affiliation.

Stephenson subsequently declined the appointment.

Councillor Angella Brown Burke, chairman of the KSAC’s Commercial Services Committee, told the Observer yesterday that Stephenson was selected by councillors to represent the Ministry of Local Government on the board and that Calvert Thomas a second local government ministry nominee was selected to replace him after he declined the appointment.

She said that McKenzie’s objections had changed nothing as the board appointees were a majority decision.

At the time of the controversy in November Mayor Marie Atkins defended the appointments and said that the five directors were “eminently qualified and committed to the goals of efficiency and commercial viability”.

Attempts by the KSAC to relocate the vendors from the streets into the refurbished markets has met with limited success and the KSAC relented and allowed them to remain on the streets over the last two weeks of Christmas. But Greene said yesterday that the corporation would this month be continuing its efforts to relocate them.