SAVANNA-LA-MAR, Westmoreland — President of the Westmoreland Chamber of Commerce, Moses Chybar has painted a stark picture of a parish being strangled by inadequate infrastructure that is stifling its potential for economic growth.

During the chamber’s most recent meeting, which was attended by a delegation from the People’s National Party, led by Opposition Leader Mark Golding, Chybar called for a unified development model for the parish.

“The chamber would really like to sit with you to work out a model of some sort that we can actually lobby to get something happening down there. It is too prime, too good. Tourism is so vibrant in Negril. It is not far for us to have something happening from Negril to Sav and have some attractions down there. It is ideal. We need to have that,” he urged Golding and his team.

Chybar cited a lack of long-term planning and pointed to three critical areas where progress has stalled: sewage, potable water infrastructure, and underutilised prime real estate. He said the most immediate and “very big” issue facing local businesses is the lack of a central sewerage system. According to Chybar, because Savanna-la-Mar sits below sea level, high tides and heavy rains frequently overwhelm individual cesspools, resulting in an immense financial burden on small businesses that are forced to hire private trucks to manage the waste.

“Most of us have to be paying that truck to drain the cesspools and take it away… Some of them charge like $55,000 per load. When it’s raining heavily and the rough tides come in, you have to do that like once or twice a month,” he argued.

“Just imagine the impact on small businesses – and it has been like that for a long time. We really need to have a central sewage system down here,” he urged.

On the issue of water scarcity, Chybar said that while Westmoreland has seen a surge in housing developments over the last few years, the National Water Commission (NWC) has failed to provide a “corresponding type of improvement in the infrastructure”. He argued that the disconnect between growth and utility capacity has left customers with little more than a trickle of water.

The chamber president said the current approach of reactively upgrading pipes as new houses come on stream is inefficient. He called for a 50-year infrastructure road map to ensure that productivity isn’t hamstrung by interruptions in the NWC supply.

“What we really need is to be able to sit down to see what it will look like 50 years from now; to start putting in that kind of infrastructure that you don’t have to go back every year or every time there’s 100 or 200 houses coming on stream to put in some bigger pipes again,” he suggested.

“That has been happening around here. You find that you’re trying to produce,[but] the water supply is not enough,” added Chybar.

He also pointed to challenges with the electricity supply, though he conceded that they were not as bad as the sewage issue. Pockets of Westmoreland, one of the parishes hardest hit by Hurricane Melissa, were without power for months but there has been an improvement.

Beyond utility issues, Chybar expressed deep frustration over the “idle” state of the Savanna-la-Mar ocean front. He noted that despite its status as “prime property for development” the area remains unused, and past advocacy by the chamber has fallen on “deaf ears”.

The chamber president sees the ocean front as the key to expanding the economic vibrancy of the neighbouring tourism hub of Negril into the rest of the parish.