MONTEGO BAY, St James — The ongoing issue of illegal street vending in this resort city will require the St James Municipal Corporation (SJMC) to head back to the drawing board with their crackdown and enforcement efforts, says Mayor of Montego Bay Leeroy Williams.

“We have an issue enforcing because what is happening is that the vendors have taken over the sidewalks so pedestrians have nowhere to walk and they have to be going into the roads. To make matters worse, when the pedestrians try to use the sidewalk, if they step on the goods that the vendors spread out there, then they either physically or verbally abuse them, and that is a no-no.”

More than a year ago, in an effort to regulate the city’s worrying vending problem, Mayor Williams announced that the municipality is moving towards designating specific streets in Montego Bay as vending zones.

The initiative was met with much enthusiasm and support by vendors who were required to become registered in order to ply their wares in the zones.

Some 156 vendors were registered and given permits under the initiative. The permits expired on August 1.

Despite the declaration of vending zones, the issue of illegal street vending still persists.

Mayor Williams, however, is confident that the municipality will “get it right” in time for the start of next month’s registration of vendors.

The main issue to be tackled is an oversubscription of vendors, he told the Jamaica Observer West.

“The situation is really an enormous task to deal with. I can tell you right now that nobody is registered now. We intend to do the registration next month, so right now every vendor is on his or her own. The big problem that we have is a capacity problem because there are so many vendors and we do not have the space to accommodate them,” Mayor Williams said.

“I can tell you that for the registration in September we are going to deal with the capacity that we have just to make sure that we do not take on too many vendors on these streets and we do not have the space for them. So, if Church Lane can only accommodate 20 [vendors], that is how many we are going to have when we register them again.”

The designated vending spaces that were announced last year are Corner Lane, Lower Lawrence Lane, Church Lane, Lower Market Lane, North Lane, and parts of Orange Street.

Though St James Street was declared a no- vending zone, the mayor pointed out that the municipality has been met with a lot of resistance in their efforts to enforce this rule. This, he told the Observer West, will be revisited.

“We are currently looking at the situation to see how we can deal with it. With the food vendors, especially the pan chicken vendors, you will find that they are in Sam Sharpe Square and they are in the vicinity of the cultural centre and it looks bad,” he bemoaned.

“They are dirtying up the place with the ash and oil from the pans. Plus the smoke all over the place just doesn’t look good, so we are going to push for them to be removed, and they are really supposed to find spaces to vend because we did not tell them that they can be in that area. In fact, the whole St James Street is a no-vending area and we should be having a zero-tolerance approach to vending on that street.”

As he acknowledges the importance of the vendors in the city, Mayor Williams told the Observer West that provisions are being made by the authorities to find a common ground.

“We are looking at the possibility of finding some other areas where some of the vendors can vend, and we are thinking of having night vending. We are thinking of opening the Harbour Street car park after its closing time, once the cars are out, so we could use that area to facilitate some of the vendors until about midnight,” he said.

The mayor noted that, once the logistics of this initiative is properly sorted, the municipality will move to have it announced and enforced for the benefit for all parties.

“We are still working on the whole logistics of it, like who are the vendors we will include, but by the time we start our registration I think we should be using that place to provide the vendors some vending space,” he explained.

In the meantime, members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) and other State agencies are spearheading an operation aimed at restoring public order in the resort city. The operation, being carried out under the theme ‘Restoring Paradise, A Public Order Reset’ began on Monday and will run for 14 days.

Mayor Williams welcomed the police’s initiative.

“What you find is that a number of infractions are taking place all over the city of Montego Bay and the situation has become untenable, so we do have this operation going on,” he told the Observer West.