BLACK RIVER, St Elizabeth — Former Mayor of Black River and councillor for the Pedro Plains Division, Jeremy Palmer (JLP), wants responsibility for garbage collection and disposal returned to parish councils.

Speaking against the backdrop of what he described as a “crisis in the collection of garbage in St Elizabeth”, Palmer told the Jamaica Observer Central that the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) which has national responsibility for domestic solid waste was doing a poor job.

He argued that as currently structured, garbage collection and disposal was too centralised for a country and population of Jamaica’s size.

“You can’t have one agency throughout the country that is collecting garbage or responsible for it and you have different, different layers of three million people,” Palmer said.

“It is far too centralised, with too many layers of bureaucracy that has to respond to the simple collection of garbage, which is a simple thing…” he said.

“My own thinking is that it should be returned to the parish council and the parish council uses its existing staff and contracts it out,” Palmer said.

He claimed the task of “contracting out to private contractors” could be “adequately carried out by either the planning department or the roads and works department” of the various parish council administrations.

Parish councils had responsibility for garbage collection in Jamaica prior to the establishment of the NSWMA in the 1990s.

Palmer told teh newspaper that in sections of St Elizabeth, garbage was piling up with long gaps in collection, apparently because of a shortage of trucks.

“Certainly, in my division of Pedro Plains, the garbage is piling up in a massive way,” said Palmer.

“Also, in Southfield it is piling up, hung up on fence along the roadside … in many cases for weeks and not collected, and I believe that the crisis has to do largely with the lack of collection units in the parish,” he said.