The municipality of Portmore, St Catherine should be sporting a well needed $11-million face-lift after what Mayor George Lee is calling “the most massive Christmas clean-up programme” now underway.

With the onset of the Yuletide season, Portmore is among the many communities where large numbers of unemployed persons, mainly women, have been employed to do Christmas work and earn some wages ahead of the commercially-driven Christmas.

Lee, who has been complaining about the slow rate of progress since he took over the helm of the municipality in the country’s first direct elections for mayor, said the clean-up would be a precursor to a major beautification programme that is to come early in the New Year.

“Eleven million dollars are (now) being spent on various clean-up programmes,” the Mayor said.

“Residents are very much aware that, at least, an attempt is being made to make the community cleaner, as they see one of the most massive Christmas clean-up programmes in the community over the past few weeks.”

He said drains were being cleaned and the mosquito problem lessened and “we are putting in place a maintenance programme to ensure that they are kept clean”, the mayor said.

Mayor Lee plans to make beautification and cleaning a priority of his administration in the coming year: “Portmore must look better and smell better,” he insisted.

But Lee admitted that there was a serious sewage disposal problem for the community, saying that it had to be corrected by the NWC. Sewage backed up in people’s homes when heavy rains fall, causing mosquitoes to breed in the water channels and creating an unbearable stench in the canals, he said.

The mayor, who lives in the more affluent Bridgeport community, blamed the sewage plant there for the problems with canals such as the major one running through Edgewater and Bridgeport. Sewage is being disposed of into the canals. Nearly all the NWC’s sewage plants in the community were defective, said Lee.

“I’ve been on it for more than 10 years now,” he said, referring to his stints as chairman of the Portmore Joint Council which prepared him for the job as mayor.

Commenting on the sewage situation in Portmore, minister of water and housing, Donald Buchanan, under whose portfolio the NWC falls, said that of the 100 sewage facilities operated by the NWC islandwide, only five, including some recently completed ones in Montego Bay, Negril and Ocho Rios, were built by the Commission or its forerunners. All the others were built by various developers and subsequently handed over to the NWC for maintenance and operation.

Additionally, he pointed out, they were all designed with “specific, limited useful lifetime, usually 20-25 years.

“It is to be noted that the vast majority of the systems now in operation have long outlived their design life,” he told Parliament recently.

Buchanan didn’t think that the solution was to be found in “mere maintenance, but rather in replacement of the majority of these systems that are long past their design life expectancy”.

Lee contended that now that the NWC had gotten a rate increase from the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR), it should be able to deal with the matter. Both the minister and the NWC’s public relations manager, Charles Buchanan, disagreed.

Buchanan said that while the new rates would allow the Commission to come closer to the true cost of dealing with problems like Portmore’s sewage disposal, “it will not be enough to meet all our needs”.

With regards to the systems in Portmore, Buchanan said it should be remembered that of the three main systems in the community, the Bridgeport and Independence City treatment plants “are as old as the communities they serve – in excess of 25 years”. “These systems need to be replaced and expanded in order to meet the demands of what is now the largest housing development in the country.”

He noted that the much newer Greater Portmore plant had attracted much less attention, as it was a facultative pond system, unlike the mechanical systems in Bridgeport and Independence City.

The pond system needed no electricity for operation, is simple and inexpensive to operate and consistently produced waste of an acceptable standard, the minister said.

The NWC’s Charles Buchanan admitted that most of the NWC’s sewerage systems in Portmore were in need of major overhaul, but said that work on them would have to await the US$45-million Soapberry project for the Kingston Harbour which, he said, would be formally launched soon.