THE land and environment ministry has completed the revision of the development plan, under which guidelines for utilising lands in the Corporate Area are set out.

At a luncheon put on by the Jamaica Developers’ Association this week at the Terra Nova Hotel, the land and environment minister Dean Peart said that the Development Plan for Kingston and St Andrew was complete and was being printed.

Work on the Development Order for the Corporate Area has also commenced, he said.

The ministry, Peart said, had secured funding to enable the development orders of eleven parishes to be either updated or to allow for new orders to be undertaken.

“Negril and Manchester are being updated. The Santa Cruz plan is quite advanced and will be finalised in January 2006. In fact, we have secured funding to undertake new, as well as to update some development orders in eleven parishes,” Peart said.

The land and environment minister, who urged the developers to view Jamaica’s environment as capital, said that they were in partnership with the ministry in respect of matters related to sustainable development and the protection of the environment.

“I urge you to view our environment as capital. The capital which must be safeguarded just as how we safeguard money; because failure to do so will result in nothing being available for future development. We do not have the luxury of doing as we wish without due regard for the consequences to our social and economic well-being,” he said.

In designing and building, protection of the environment and disaster mitigation had to be borne in mind, said Peart.

He told the developers that the Building Code had to be revised to “mitigate against the impact of climate change such as storm surges and more intense hurricanes”.

The ministry, said Peart, would also be proceeding to amend the Real Estate Dealers Act and the Developers Act.

Proposed amendments to the Real Estate Act would be aimed at “improving controls” to “better regulate development schemes and to protect prospective purchases who enter pre-payment contracts”, said the minister.

At the same time, he said that amending the Registration (Strata) Titles legislation would improve the management of strata properties and ensure that prospective purchasers are made aware of their responsibilities to pay maintenance at the very beginning when they go to buy into an apartment complex.

“It is expected that significant improvement in the upkeep of strata properties will result,” said the minister.