The Kingston and St Andrew Corporation’s Building and Town Planning Committee on Wednesday approved construction of a temporary site office at the United States Embassy property on Bamboo Avenue in Kingston.

The committee made it clear, however, that the planning permission was not an approval for the embassy to commence any construction works for the chancery and related buildings.

Thelma Levy, the KSAC’s director of planning, had told a May 19 meeting of the corporation’s Building and Town Planning Committee that approval of construction of the temporary site office would not be granted until details of the planning permission for the outline of the overall development was presented.

Details of the planning permission granted by the Town and Country Planning Authority on April 28 for the retention and construction of the temporary site offices at the embassy property was subsequently presented to the committee on Wednesday.

In addition to the chancery, construction at the Bamboo Avenue premises will include a utility building, main compound access control, marine security quarters, service compound access control and consular compound access control buildings on the property.

In the meantime, acting chairman of the Building and Town

Planning Committee Waderoy Clarke has appointed a sub- committee to meet with the Liguanea Coalition of Citizens Associations which opposes the embassy’s plan to site its offices at Bamboo Avenue. The sub-committee was set up on the recommendation of Kingston Mayor Desmond McKenzie.

The association, in a resolution passed at a recent meeting, said the siting of the embassy in the upscale community would destroy “the peace, harmony and character of the area”.

Mayor McKenzie: “What we have dealt with here does not in any way constitute the problems that they the residents are talking about. That will probably come when we come to deal with the other aspects of the approval process. So I will ask you Mr Chairman, to constitute a small sub-committee and to ask the administrative officer to liaison with the Town Clerk and to afford the residents an opportunity to meet with the sub-committee and based on those discussions you could come back to the Building Committee with whatever was discussed.”

But People’s National Party (PNP) councillor Linton Walters (Waterhouse Division) said that even though the council, as the representatives of the citizens, wanted to note their concerns, this would have to be done within the confines of the law.

“If the other authorities that are governed by the law and are given such mandate by the law to give their approval, then the KSAC would be hard-pressed to come with any other position. But it has to be dealt with within the confines of the law by which we are governed,” said Walters, an attorney-at-law.

At a meeting of the Liguanea Coalition of Citizens Associations on at the Campion College auditorium on Monday, Colin Campbell, the former PNP Member of Parliament for East St Andrew who lives in the Liguanea area, said that while the US Government had the right to design and build their embassies in a way that suited their security, Jamaican planning institutions also had the right to “say what can go where.”

He said that the siting of the embassy at the corner of Bamboo Avenue and Old Hope Road, near 30 communities and within the approximate location of at least eight of the island’s premier schools and an already over busy commercial area, was not appropriate.