MANDEVILLE, Manchester — There is uncertainty about when the annual general meeting (AGM) of the Association of Local Government Authorities of Jamaica (ALGAJ) will be held after Friday’s long-awaited meeting adjourned in chaos.

Police had to be called in to ease tensions after a disruption over the agenda and how the meeting was to proceed occurred.

During the ordeal, ALGAJ President Winston Maragh’s left hand was bruised after a microphone was forcefully taken from him, reportedly by a female councillor.

Maragh, a member of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party and former mayor of May Pen, accused members of the People’s National Party of stirring up trouble during the meeting, the first AGM since 2018, when he decided to move to the election of officers on the agenda.

“However, our PNP members thought to themselves that they would have been outvoted at that time and so they decided to bring the meeting into chaos,” he claimed.

“One of the councillors pulled the microphone from my hand and in the process of doing so my hand was bruised and cut,” he told journalists.

During a follow-up interview with the Jamaica Observer Maragh said he believes the councillor who grabbed the microphone was influenced to do so.

“She is my friend, and I believe she was coerced in doing it. I believe, based on what was happening there and all the confusion and everything, she was coerced in doing what she did. Her intention was to grab away the microphone from my hand so that I could stop talking,” Maragh said.

He said sometime after, police turned up to the meeting and it was adjourned.

“What happened is that the meeting was called to order at 10:02 am and we were going down according to the agenda. Some of the items were cut short, because the majority of the meeting did not have any questions, like the president’s report is a 12-page-long [document]. I asked them if they wanted me to go through it, they said ‘no’, taken as read,” said Maragh.

“The financial report was there and I asked [if there were] any questions on the financial reports, because it was circulated and everybody got a folder with it and they said ‘no questions’. The majority of the room was there shouting ‘no questions’ and so the next item on the agenda now was the election of officers,” he explained.

However, an aspirant for the presidency of the association, Councillor Scean Barnswell (People’s National Party, Hayes Division) accused Maragh of breaching ALGAJ’s constitution.

“The president moved for a suspension of the standing order to move straight into the election and we said ‘President, you can’t move into an election before you deal with these important matters, which is your report, but more so the financial statement report. In the ALGA constitution, class six under business of meeting, it states that at least 21 days prior to the date of a fixed AGM each authority shall be forwarded by the secretary, a resolution or letters as it relates to what should be on the agenda,” said Barnswell.

“We got the notices, but it went on further to say that the copy of the agenda shall be sent to each council at least five days before the meeting. I saw the agenda just this morning (Friday) and as a result we are saying to the [president] you have breached the constitution of ALGAJ and we are asking for us to have the discussion and deal with it and he refused. The members said we cannot proceed. The time for voting would have been 11 o’clock, based on the agenda, and when he asked for the suspension of the standing order was about 10:15, so we were nowhere near to having an election,” he added.