STATE minister for local government, Colin Fagan, says he is not opposed to the idea of term limits for councillors and mayors.

“It has always been spoken about (but) no real pressure… The more people agitate it may put pressure to bear. I think it could be a good thing,” the junior minister told yesterday’s Jamaica Observer’s Monday Exchange.

But he noted that, for the moment, the only proposed change on the table is to increase the tenure of councillors from three to

four years.

Project manager in the Local Government Reform Unit, Clive Edwards, meanwhile, said it would be difficult for this type of change (term limit) to be made at the local level when central government has not indicated that it would make any such move for members of parliament.

“Sometimes when we try to establish term limits, as has happened in other jurisdictions, you find that you sometimes lose the benefit of involvement and other activities that you would have rather had. I would suggest that the most sustainable way is to create a framework that allows for more involvement,” Edwards stated.

At the same time, director of corporate communications in the Ministry of Local Government and Community Development, Oliver Fagan, said low levels of participation in local government elections continued to exist mainly because Jamaicans still do not believe parish council votes make any real difference to policy or the governance agenda.

“That is clearly the perception. There are others, but that is the traditional one,” Fagan said, adding that, generally, participation in the electoral process remains low.

Government, he argued, was therefore seeking to increase the “value” of local governance, so that more people will be motivated to go to the polls.

Fagan pointed out that the provision for mandatory consultations with the public on council expenditure and budgeting is one of the measures being taken to get Jamaicans to take a new look at local government.

On the matter of putting off local government elections until December 29, 2016, Minister Fagan said it made sense to wait until all the necessary legislation to boost the reform process have been passed. He said the Government is “far down the wicket” in that regard, and that “having come so far, we would want to give the people an opportunity to see what these changes are… It is timely to have the postponement to have a conversation about these Bills”.

Government said recently that the only hold-up in calling the elections was the reform process; dismissing the idea that it feared losing at the polls given the economic pressures being borne by the Jamaican people under a burdensome International Monetary Fund agreement.

Local government elections were constitutionally due at the end of June.

— Alphea Saunders