KINGSTON, Jamaica- Mayor of Kingston and St Andrew, Andrew Swaby has accused the chairman of the Association of Local Government Authorities of Jamaica (ALGA-J) Winston Maragh and Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) mayors of not wanting to host an annual general meeting where councillors can choose a new chairman.

“We have not had an ALGA-AGM meeting since 2017, and the Act speaks to having an annual general meeting every two years…ALGA is the Association of Local Government of Jamaica. It is a trade union for the councillors. So I, as mayor of Kingston-Saint Andrew, is on the executive since I have assumed the position of mayor. We pushed last year to have an ALGA AGM, and there was an attempt to have an ALGA AGM meeting in Mandeville. For reasons that was in the public sphere, it had to be aborted. We were only invited to a meeting just last week since then. And we raised the issue again about having an ALGA general meeting. And I find that the chairman, along with the JLP mayors, don’t want to have an AGM meeting. A mayor actually asked a question about sharing the minutes of the meetings before the actual meeting and the JLP mayors that were present there actually asked that the meeting be adjourned just to avoid the discussion around the ALGA general meeting, “ Swaby said.

Swaby said there has been calls for a date to be set for ALGA general meeting where all the councillors can choose their chairman.

“The chairman is former mayor, now councillor. Well, he has always been a councillor, Winston Maragh of the Clarendon Municipal Cooperation. He had indicated that he’s not running back as chairman. I don’t know why he’s holding on to power and why the JLP mayors are holding on to power. I don’t have a difficulty if an election is called and whoever wins, let them win. But it can’t be a situation where you’re stifling democracy of the body,” Swaby added. “It discusses issues related to both the municipal corporations and the councillors. For example, it will discuss the whole issue of salary, if you look at it from a personal point of view, but it also discuss things that we should be doing and our relationship with the ministry. There were issues on the agenda that related to the functioning of your own councillors, and they choose not to take it. They aborted the meeting because I have said to them that we should deferred taking the minutes and discuss the other agenda items. And they chose not to. All because they don’t want to have a discussion around the annual general meeting of ALGA.”

Swaby has accused the JLP mayors of politicising the matter.

“The fact that there is a pending general election.They don’t want, they will see it, that’s my interpretation, they see it as a defeat if their candidate don’t win. I believe that the JLP mayors, who actually sit on ALGA, and all of them sit on ALGA, and who were at the meeting last time around, they are politicising the issue. I believe there’s a time and a place for that. We are talking about effective running of the local authorities. We are talking about advocating for the councils ourselves and for us to be in a position to perform our jobs much more better than it is right now,” he argued.