Close to 10 years after it started looking at putting parking meters on the streets of the capital, the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC) is reporting that talks with the private company contracted to provide the service have crashed.

“It wasn’t going anywhere and there are other parties who are interested in providing on-street parking,” town clerk Lincoln Evans told the Observer.

A review of the file of correspondence between the KSAC, the Development Bank of Jamaica (formerly National Investment Bank of Jamaica) – which was responsible for the privatisation – and the company, Integrated Security Systems (ISS), showed that the breakdown took place when ISS proposed to include the KSAC-run parking lots in New Kingston as part of its package.

In one letter, the principal of the company, Julian Spence, suggested that including the ‘off street’ parking lots in New Kingston as part of the privatisation package would increase revenue control systems.

“Based upon the relatively small number of ‘on-road’ parking spaces in the New Kingston area. [and] knowledge that these car parks are not generating anywhere near the full revenue potential for the KSAC, based upon the operation systems and controls that [now] exist, we are proposing that the scope of the parking control system be enlarged to include the ‘off-road’ parking spaces,” stated a letter from ISS dated March 31, 2004.

The original proposal was that the company would undertake the project for implementation of meters in New Kingston and Downtown Kingston. Sometime in 2004, however, the company started suggested approaching the project on a phased basis, with Phase one being the implementation of meters in New Kingston and Phase two in Downtown Kingston.

According to ISS, the original proposal was “unlikely to be feasible in view of the long-term development plans for downtown Kingston”.

Last week, former head of ISS, Julian Spence, who now runs a wireless Internet service provider called J2, said the company got word from the NIBJ that the project would not proceed because the KSAC was no longer interested.

“The project got dragged out, dragged out by NIBJ. KSAC got frustrated,” Spence said, adding that the inclusion of the New Kingston parking lots was not a prerequisite, only a suggestion.

In response to written questions, the DBJ redirected all queries to the KSAC.

“DBJ does not currently have a role in the installation of electronic parking meters in the city,” a response from the Investments and Privatisation Unit at the DBJ read. “In September 2005, after several months of consideration, the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation advised the NIBJ that ‘on-street’ parking in New Kingston and Downtown Kingston were no longer available for privatisation,” the response continued. “In October 2005, the board of directors of the NIBJ directed that a recommendation be made to Cabinet to remove the Parking Control System from the list of entries to be privatised.”

Spence said his company would proceed with the project “if the KSAC indicated that they were willing to look at it seriously and deal with us directly”.

But Evans was resolute that the KSAC had no interest in pursuing the project with ISS.

“It is off with this company because the proposal they were putting on the table could not work,” Evans said, citing ISS’ proposal of using tokens instead of coins in the meters as unfeasible.

Evans said, however, that the prospect of metered parking in the city is not dead.

“On-street parking is going to be a definite reality, but not for this company.”

He said the KSAC was in early negotiations with a company, which he declined to name, and which seemed to have a more “fine-tuned proposal”, adding that the KSAC had met with that company twice.