Margaret Morris, journalist and author, in her book Tour Jamaica, describes Mandeville as being “unlike other rural Jamaican towns: it is cool, it is clean and there are no slums”. That was 1988.

Last Thursday, from her desk in the central Jamaica town, where she has lived and worked for almost two decades, Ivy Shecklewood described the Manchester capital as “wet-up, nasty, dirty,” adding “A nuh Mandeville dis”.

The suggestion that Mandeville has changed, as expressed in these two points of view, shared 18 years apart, is more than just an opinion now. Some sections of the town reek of stale urine.

Last Thursday when the Sunday Observer visited, water was overflowing from a manhole on a section of Main Street called Mandeville Hill. People who work in the vicinity said the water had been running for about a week, and that the parish council had assured them it would be addressed.

There are constant physical battles between the vendors and the municipal police about selling in unauthorised areas in the town centre.

The main thoroughfare in the town centre has been changed to accommodate one or two-way traffic flow several times in the last few years, all in a bid to ease the congestion. But with little success.

Town planners are continuing the search for solutions to the town’s main problems of congestion and improper waste disposal, in their quest to return the town to its pride of place in central Jamaica.

Planning director at the Manchester Parish Council, Sean Rowe, said one of the main reasons for the specific problem of congestion was that the town was not built for long-term or varied purposes. Residents with whom the Sunday Observer spoke said the proliferation of street vendors had contributed to the congestion, and the decline of civic pride had led to the garbage-strewn streets.

“It [Mandeville] get so commercialised,” said Laurel Doman-Davis, who has worked in Mandeville for more than a decade. She added that the scene in the town on Christmas Day reminded her of downtown Kingston, and insisted that in all her years working in the Manchester town, this was the worst she had seen it.

“The vendors are not free to do as they want in Kingston so they see Mandeville as the place. So the vendors come down and the pickpockets come with them,” Doman-Davis argued.

The general sentiment of most of the people interviewed was that the town could be much cleaner. Shecklewood said, however, that citizens had become lax regarding cleanliness and litter on the streets.

“Is like civic pride dead when it come to Mandeville people,” she suggested.

Mandeville, located west of Jamaica’s capital Kingston, sits approximately 2,000 feet above sea level and was laid out in 1816, fifty years before Karl Benz invented the modern motor car, when Jamaica was still under colonial rule. The streets were made small and the buildings had different uses.

At the time of the 2001 Census, there were 47,469 people living in Mandeville, which represented a 17.85 per cent population growth from the previous census a decade before.

The population of Mandeville has had two major influences in the discovery of Manchester’s bauxite wealth in the 1950s and the conversion of the small Seventh Day Adventist West Indies College into a larger Northern Caribbean University, which offered more programmes and accepted more students, in 1999. Additionally, over time the desigantion of physical spaces has changed.

“So what was once a little office, is now a bank,” Rowe said, “and with the bank comes traffic and you have to have parking for the employees.”

Rowe said one of the suggestions being considered now was to designate some areas in the town pedestrian-only zones.

A study conducted last year by the Manchester Parish Development Committee found that 48 per cent of the sample supported the idea of pedestrian-only zones.

The survey, called the Central Mandeville Study, also found that of all the people who travel through Mandeville, 65 per cent used buses or taxis, while 30 per cent travel by private vehicles. Additionally, the majority of those who travel by private vehicles said they would pay for parking.

There is currently only one paid-parking lot in Mandeville. The recommendations from the Central Mandeville Study will go into the Local Sustainable Development Plan for Manchester, the latest draft of which is expected to be completed by next November.

Other areas of concern, Rowe said, included the Mandeville market, which is located in the town centre and is one of the major traffic magnets. He said the idea of relocating the market had been looked at repeatedly, with some business owners being resistant because the presence of the market meant more business for them.

Recently, ‘no right turn’ signs have been erected at the four-way intersection of Caledonia and South Race Course roads, another attempt to tackle the congestion problem. But on the day the Observer visited, several motorists were seen breaking the signs.

There are also seven supermarkets in the town centre.

“What happens is that people plan for buildings and they don’t plan for people,” Rowe said.

He said one proposal before the Parish Council now was to make it mandatory for delivery trucks to drop off goods before seven o’clock in the mornings.

Former mayor of Mandeville Cecil Charlton, who served for more than 20 years through much of the town’s glory years, said during his tenure delivery trucks could not arrive before midnight, because they interrupted pedestrian traffic.

“If a nuh Charlton, a nuh nobody,” Shecklewood said, drawing a parallel between the former mayor’s administration and those of successive mayors. Attempts to reach current mayor Desmond Harrison were unsuccessful.

Pointing out that he was not attempting to belittle anyone, Charlton said part of the problem was that measures such as that concerning the delivery trucks are relaxed some time after being instituted.

“I’m not going to be silent forever,” Charlton said, adding that the town’s problems could benefit from consultation between current and past leaders to arrive at the best solutions.

“I have done plenty already, it is so visible it’s not funny,” Charlton said. He added, however, that citizens who sat around and did nothing except say ‘When Charlton was mayor, we didn’t have this’, contributed to the problem because they did nothing.

Meanwhile, long-range planner at the Parish Council, Phil Rodriques, said the council had just started liaising with the National Solid Waste Management Authority on practical ways to reduce waste in the town.

He said waste offences were hard to pin down, mainly because there was no set day for municipal court. Additionally, there were weak fines for waste offences and it was simply hard to coax a change out of people without strong fines.

“The hardest part of instituting any programme is trying to change cultural views,” he said.

Rodriques and Rowe said the Local Sustainable Development Plan for Manchester, an entire section of which focuses on Mandeville, was geared at addressing other problems such as the absence of green spaces in the town.

Meanwhile, Charlton said one way of addressing the issue of vending in unauthorised areas was for police on watch to bar the vendors from entering the areas in the first place, instead of fighting with them to remove the goods after they had laid them out.

mccattyk@jamaicaobserver.com