A joint select committee has been formed by Parliament to consider and develop proposals for the reform of local government. Committee members from the House of Representatives are Dean Peart, minister of local government and environment (chairman); Harry Douglas, state minister in the local government ministry; Victor Cummings, state minister in the ministry of agriculture and lands; as well as Sharon Hay-Webster; Luther Buchanan; Andrew Holness; Shahine Robinson; and Barrington Gray.

Members from the Senate are Noel Monteith, state minister in the ministry of education; in addition to Dr Trevor Munroe; Norman Grant; Anthony Johnson; and Arthur Williams.

In his statement supporting the bills delaying local government elections by another year, on December 6, Minister Peart said the delay offered the opportunity for the implementation of reform ahead of the elections.

“What will be far more meaningful is to use the opportunity provided by the National Advisory Council Report to forge agreement on exactly how this outcome is to be achieved, and to take concrete steps in that direction,” Peart said.

He noted that a joint select committee had previously been appointed on the occasion of the passage of a motion, from Cummings, seeking to examine the issues surrounding local government reform and report to the House.

He said that, after one sitting, the committee had discontinued its deliberations, following the re-establishment of the National Advisory Council in February 2004, pending a report from the council.

The report from the council, chaired by Professor Rex Nettleford, was also tabled by Peart on December 6. Recommendations included:

. the retention of the present structure of local government, within the parish as the administrative unit, as there was very little support for regionalisation;

. a comprehensive evaluation of Portmore as a municipality, to provide an informed basis for determining the success of that experiment and the readiness of the model for replication in other jurisdictions;

. the entrenchment of local government in the constitution to protect it against arbitrary actions by central government and from being treated as a creature of central government;

. the promulgation of a new Local Government Reform Act to, among other things, create a uniform act for local government;

. the revision of the National Solid Waste Management Act to recognise the local authorities as having a role in solid waste management; and

. the revision and or consolidation of the Municipal and Parish Councils (Unified Services) Acts, which establishes the Municipal and Parish Council services commissions to create one unified service for all government employees;

. the reconfirmation of the Parochial Revenue Fund as a dedicated vehicle for financing the local authorities;

. the reintroduction of local and other charges to provide greater buoyancy to the financing of property-related services; and

. vesting local authorities with greater control over sources of revenues to finance their operations.

Another of the recommendations was that the councils be conferred with the power to float municipal bonds, and access loans from commercial and other sources to fund their capital programmes.

henryb@jamaicaobserver.com

PEART… to chair parliamentary committee