MAY PEN, Clarendon — Councillor Radcliffe McDonald, (Jamaica Labour Party, Toll Gate Division), has put his peers in the Clarendon Municipal Corporation on notice that if they buy and install street lights stolen from his division, they will be brought to book.

“When I see persons stealing lights it hurt me badly. I say to any one of my colleagues or anyone else who is involved in buying those lights to stop it, because people gonna get themselves in serious trouble. People are out there looking for them because those lights are very hard to get,” he said.

He was speaking at last Thursday’s monthly meeting of the corporation.

“When my colleague gets 10 lights and I get 10 and somebody steal some of his lights and come sell me and I buy it to put it up in my community to look good, it is wrong. The other day a gentleman asked if I wanted some lights to buy and I missed it because I jumped the gun. I said, ‘Anybody I catch with those lights going to prison!’ The man seh, ‘Mi naa badda tell you.’ I couldn’t sleep that night. I should have told him to carry them come and make the police arrest him,” he told the meeting.

McDonald explained that several street lights had been stolen from his division and he was in the process of investigating who stole them and where they may have been reinstalled.

“Recently a new one was stolen from Sunset Crescent and up till now I have not heard anything on it,” he said, noting that he has made several reports to the power company.

“I want to know if the lights being installed by the JPS [Jamaica Public Service] can be bought elsewhere. The reason I ask is because I traverse some places and I see some lights in some complex and I want to investigate those lights. I want to know if a normal citizen can go into a store and purchase those same lights,” he added.

JPS’s Customer Service Manager Kareen Jackson said none of the lights being installed by the company are available for purchase at stores.

“No normal citizen can go out there and purchase the lights that are being installed… So, if you’re seeing lights all over, it simply means those lights were taken from another location,” she said: She added: The company has received several reports of stolen LED street lights from both the Toll Gate and York Town divisions.“

She says the light and power company will be replacing those lights stolen from the main roads.

McDonald said he will be passing on the information he has on the stolen lights to the company for an investigation to be carried out.