A planning committee has been established by the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) as the organisation moves to take on Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s directive of building Jamaica’s ‘third city’.

Last July, Holness mandated the newly installed board of the UDC to make the creation of Jamaica’s third city a priority.

In a news release from the UDC, Holness was quoted as saying that a new city would help to alleviate the urban overflow from Kingston and reduce the burden on the capital’s infrastructure. He noted that the establishment of a third city would support the Government’s objective of having two-thirds of the Jamaican population living in urban centres.

“We have started the process.Shyril McIntosh-Wilson is our project planner/manager, and our chairman has already signed off on a planning working committee. We’ve been sending out letters now to invite members selected to be part of the committee and we’ve been getting responses,” deputy general manager of planning, development and project management at the UDC, Lorna Perkins told the Jamaica Observer during a recent interview at the corporation’s business headquarters in downtown Kingston.

She stated that the technical team had already started the research to do the justification as to where the new city could possibly be, so that when the committee meets later this month, some research would have already been started.

“To date, we have developed a planning framework and terms of reference for a committee which will include many of our agencies, to come up with the criteria and justification of where the city will be and what is required and to also look at the time frame in achieving our mandate,” Perkins explained.

Asked if she thought the UDC was the right organisation to be tasked with the charge, Perkins said that the mission and vision of the UDC is to make development happen and it is on that basis, as well as the work that it has done in the past, why the corporation thinks that it was chosen to lead the charge.

She added that the UDC has in its structure a large proportion of planners, architects, engineers, quantity surveyors and all the necessary technical expertise needed in order to carry out its duty.

Perkins noted, however, that while the charge was issued directly to the UDC, the organisation would still have to work with other agencies such as the National Environment and Planning Agency, the Ministry of Transport and Works, and the National Housing Trust, among others.

As it relates to prospective challenges, the deputy general manager explained that finances, although important, is not the first challenge that comes to mind when looking at the project.

“All parties and all stakeholders must be on board. Yes, we need to ensure the consultancy takes place, but at the end of the day, we must rally around the dream and it must transcend from one Administration to the other. That is my greatest fear, we start and then the next Administration has a different idea and we don’t get it done,” Perkins stated.

She added: “If we achieve that, if we can get that collaboration with everybody; of course, we know that it’s gonna take revenue and money to do stuff but that is not normally my thing as the biggest problem. It’s just for us to say we gonna do it and we gonna do it in ‘X’ years and we all try and get it done.”