SEIZED with the urgency to ensure a speedy and fair distribution of Hurricane Melissa relief supplies in his St Catherine North Western constituency, Member of Parliament Damion Crawford on Monday met with representatives of both sides of the political divide to hammer out a plan.

“I reached out to all the elected representatives and the caretakers for the North Western St Catherine constituency, including the caretakers for the council position and also for the Member of Parliament position [the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP)] Newton Amos. Unfortunately, Mr Amos was absent because he was overseas, but he sent two representatives to the meeting,” the People’s National Party’s (PNP) Crawford told the Jamaica Observer on Tuesday.

“The reason why I engaged in this process was because it is a crisis and that, by extension, needs emergency response in particular as it relates to returning shelter, and immediate intervention from a standpoint of nutrition, that is food.

“To this extent, therefore, we wanted to depend on prior knowledge instead of going to take time to create new knowledge. Knowing that all of us as political candidates would have created relationships, visited multiple homes, and interacted with multiple people, I knew that there was a repository of information existing among all of the people who were politically active in the last five or six years,” added Crawford.

He pointed out that while the experts listed St Catherine North Western as a constituency which was moderately impacted by Hurricane Melissa on October 28, the Government listed it as one with a mild impact. With that designation the constituency was allocated $3 million for housing, $1.5 million for water, and a further $1.5 million to be used as deemed necessary for the recovery of people and systems.

According to Crawford, he expects a further allocation of funds to the constituency to address the impact of the Category 5 storm on its agricultural sector.

Against that background, Crawford said Monday’s meeting was called to allow representatives of the two major political parties to share their suggestions as to how the allocated money should be shared to the people most in need.

“We went through each person’s list and identified, based on objective criteria, those who were most in need. For example, did the person have young children that lost the roof of their house? Did the person have an elderly family member who was incapable of moving? Did the person have multiple dependents?

“Those were the objective criteria discussed openly by the persons present and each person, PNP or JLP, gave their list and each was discussed. Where there was an agreement, we highlighted those 20 persons as priorities going forward,” added Crawford.

He told the Observer that the meeting accepted that there are people in the constituency who might have lost their roofs but who did not qualify as priority cases and they will be tended to as soon as possible.

“We also discussed the areas that need water. There are a lot of areas that do not have access to water because the JPS (Jamaica Public Service Company) lines are still down to power some of the pumps that would carry water. We further discussed persons who might need food packages and each representative, and caretaker, received 10 food packages and we will be doing further distribution as we move along,” said Crawford.

“The entire aim was to ensure that there was fair consideration for all persons and that we took full advantage of the knowledge of all the political representatives,” added Crawford.

Member of Parliament for St Catherine North Western Damion Crawford hands over care packages to the Jamaica Labour Party’s secretary for the constituency Trenecia Marsden, following a meeting of the political representatives in the constituency on Monday.