We are about to see whether new Kingston Mayor Mr Andrew Swaby will be any better than his predecessor, Senator Delroy Williams, in curbing the wanton breaches of building construction regulations that have spectacularly defied solution.

Not that Mr Swaby has given us any reason to be optimistic. On the contrary, the mayor has started off on the wrong foot, promising to spend money on a public education programme to persuade the populace that his Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC) is not always to blame for not doing its job.

“One of the things that we need to do, as a council, is we have to educate the [population] as to what are the measures that we can take. Sometimes persons just believe that we can just go and hit down a thing — that is not the situation in all cases… You have to think about the stop orders, and if they continue, you take them to court — and you know these things take time — so there also has to be a public education aspect of it,” he said.

Mayor Swaby would be well advised to spend any funds he can scrape together, not on more public relations, but on going after the corrupt people in his organisation who are aiding and abetting the culprits who are breaching building codes and robbing the residents of their peace of mind.

The goodly gentleman assured the capital city in our Monday edition that, starting yesterday, he would meet with a team of technical personnel to “strategise a plan geared towards tackling issues relating to building approvals and construction breaches within the Corporate Area”. We look forward to his report on the outcome.

It might prove useful for us to remind Mr Swaby of the grandiose promises of Mr Williams before him. Faced with bitter complaints from long-suffering residents, the then mayor said in 2022 that he was taking on the tough task of cleaning up and modernising the messy and often corrupt building approval process.

He claimed to have demanded that the Building and Town Planning Committee kept written, detailed documentation of all material considerations and reasons for decisions taken in the approval process for each building application.

If the instructions are followed through, the building committee would henceforth have to document all planning issues, such as amenities and safety, traffic, zoning, planning history, history of enforcement, appeal history, resolution of enforcement objections, relevant plans and policies, and statutory policy guidelines, among other sore points.

Mayor Swaby should check the files, if they can be found, to see what became of those wonderful plans.

He might also wish to have a chat with Justice Minister Mr Delroy Chuck, who complained loudly last year that “money-laundering housing developers” were putting up ill-conceived high-rise apartments without regard for homeowners, while developers who follow the rules “get shafted by long delays and obvious frustration”.

Mr Chuck made it known that the errant developers were making residential living inconvenient and “an unholy mess of perennial dust, heavy equipment disturbance, and road disrepair… without notice or warning, and most times without knowledge of any amendment to, or application to amend, restrictive covenants”.

Mayor Swaby promises to report back next month. We can’t wait to see what he has unearthed.