PORT MARIA, St Mary — Chairman of the St Mary Municipal Corporation Richard Creary has challenged his officers to go beyond serving stop orders and to start dragging more people before the court for illegal building construction in the parish.

“We need to go beyond serving notices; I need some more matters before the court,” he asserted on Thursday during the monthly meeting of the corporation.

He apparently is buoyed by a case in which a Chinese businessman, Hanan Huang, was fined little more than $4.6 million in December last year for illegally constructing a four-storey building at Highgate, St Mary.

Since that judgement, the corporation’s officers have softened their approach, Creary intimated.

“It is not only Mr [Hanan Huang] that can go before the court; I need some more matters before the court,” he continued. “That is why a courthouse is there. We got a judgement on one building and from that, wi lock off. There are a number of other such buildings.”

Creary noted a structure going up at Boscobel in the parish. “When you look from the road you see a little house, but when you go down by the sea it is a four-storey mansion. That one not before the court yet,” he said, noting that he had given instruction for that location to be visited by the municipality’s officers.

Creary is also concerned about construction taking place in Stewart Town, Trinity, and behind the fire station in Port Maria.

In the meantime the corporation, during its last two sittings, heard that stop orders were recently placed on some projects.

They include two houses at the old Port Maria tennis club, acting director of planning at the corporation Alphus Gordon disclosed.

Stop orders are also being placed on some 30 houses being built on State-owned land at Frontier in Port Maria according to Stanley Davis, the municipality’s commercial services and enforcement supervisor.

He told the Jamaica Observer that some of the concrete structures going up at Frontier are two storeys high.

“There is a lot of illegal buildings being built there without permission and, as you know, there are people who build and don’t build in the right and proper way. Therefore, the municipality is moving in now to serve stop orders on all of them to have them regularised,” Davis added. “The people doing the buildings are not being receptive [to our appeals] because they will have to go and get plans drawn, and subdivision approval, and pay up their taxes. Some people are running away from those responsibilities.”