THE Kingston and St Andrew Corporation, the city’s local government, suspects that it owns far more properties than appear on the books and what the current crop of councillors know about.

So the KSAC is trying to find out.

The council plans to hire Justin Hide, a retired civil servant, who is said to have extensive knowledge of properties in Kingston, to lead the search not only to identify “lost” property but properly register real estate that has up to now fallen between the cracks.

“A search will be done at the Titles Office and the Land Valuation Department,” Vernon McLeod, the chairman of the KSAC finance committee, said at a meeting of the committee yesterday. “This is going to be a very expensive venture.”

A mostly new crop of councillors came to office after last June’s local government elections, which were swept by the Jamaica Labour Party.

At the KSAC, an administration led by Kingston’s mayor, Desmond McKenzie, took over from the one that was led by the People’s National Party’s Marie Atkinson, who ran the city for 12 years and left with a reputation of failure and incompetence.

Knowing what real estates the corporation owns is just one aspect of the drive for accountability and efficiency, its officials say.

Indeed, according to McLeod, the KSAC may even own property that it is not aware of.

Hide, according to the councillor, has told the KSAC that it will have to crosscheck its own list of properties with the one that he is developing as part of the verification process.

“He will also include in his search properties we believe might belong to the council,” said McLeod.

As part of the project, the KSAC will seek to identify properties in community use, such as parks and other open spaces, which properly belong to the local government.

“(Hide) will retrieve copies of the transfer documents to let us know who signed off on those, so that we can take it further,” McLeod explained to his committee members.

In some cases it will require the ferreting out of supporting information to prove KSAC ownership of property, especially in cases where the volume and folio numbers of titles are missing.

Hide has also suggested surveys of KSAC properties to prevent encroachments and urgent action to remove squatters. But the priority is to determine what real estate belongs to the KSAC.

“It is going to be a very big exercise (Hide) told us,” McLeod said. “It is going to be a long process.”

A specific timetable for the completion of the project was not disclosed, but according to McLeod, “by the end of January we should have some kind of report”.