BLACK RIVER, St Elizabeth – The St Elizabeth Parish Council has written to the Ministry of Local Government urging its intervention following a notice from light and power company Jamaica Public Service (JPSCo) indicating that street lights would not now be delivered to the parish because of millions of dollars in unpaid bills.

Street-lighting bills are paid by central government on behalf of the parish councils.

But a letter from the Commercial Services Department of the JPSCo dated March 15 said that as at March 14, the St Elizabeth Parish Council owed J$11.781 million for street lighting, of which J$3.491 million was current, while the rest represented arrears.

The JPSCo asked that the balance be settled by late last month (March 28) and should be kept current. Meantime, the company said, it “regrettably will not be able to accommodate any request for new street light installations in your parish”.

But in its letter to Devon Rowe, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government & Environment, the parish council noted that JPSCo had promised “for sometime now” that 101 new street lights allocated to St Elizabeth would have been installed by last March.

The letter signed by the council’s secretary manager Opal Beharie said the decision by the light and power company had now put the council in “a bad light”.

The council urged the Local Government Ministry to use its “good office” to “intervene into the matter so that an amicable agreement can be reached”.

At yesterday’s monthly meeting of the parish council in the parish capital Black River, councillors voiced outrage at the situation. They noted that in several cases of interaction with the electricity company, the issue of payment arrears had not been raised by JPSCo officers.

They expressed frustration that at Wednesday’s meeting there was no representative of the JPSCo to respond to their queries.