It was the renowned physicist and mathematician Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The recently announced multi-agency operation, which is aimed at restoring public order to the western city of Montego Bay, may well turn out to be another classic case of urban madness that has beset the so-called tourism mecca for decades.

Several years ago I put forward the following observations: “In June of 1997, at the United Nations Earth Summit+5, a Special Session of the General Assembly to Review and Appraise the Implementation of Agenda 21 held in New York, among the Success Stories from Latin America and the Caribbean that was hailed was The Greater Montego Bay Area Development Plan.

The entity responsible for this historic document was the now-defunct Greater Montego Bay Redevelopment Company (GMRC). It was put together after much consultation by urban planner the late Arlene Dixon, who was to become persona non grata to several of the city’s stakeholders because of the out-of-the-box vision she espoused, her unbridled passion to make the plan work, and her unrepentant persistence. She died a disappointed and broken woman and the development plan ultimately suffered a similar demise.

This writer is convinced that much of what ails Montego Bay at this time is as a result of the lack of proper and visionary planning, with the people at the centre of such an exercise. Prior to the establishment of the GMRC, a group of the city’s major stakeholders, including then Mayor Milton Stewart, businessmen Winston Dear and Godfrey Dyer, and Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MBCCI) luminaries, was invited to take part in a panel discussion live on the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) in Kingston. The programme was Roundtable Talk, which was broadcast live, and for which I was the moderator.

On our return to Montego Bay we had an intense and extensive discussion pertaining to what should be done to ensure that there was orderly and meaningful development of the Second City. Out of those discussions emerged a united commitment to make it happen.

It was decided that there should be a coming together of all the city’s leaders outside of any narrow partisan framework. Thus was born the Montego Bay City Caucus, which was jointly chaired by the mayor and president of the MBCCI, with the custos of St James as the honorary chairman.

The Montego Bay City Caucus, which was primarily a think tank, had several meetings on the way forward, and ultimately everyone agreed that what was needed was a development plan, which would act as a road map to the future. In order for this dream to be realised, it was decided that a company would have to be incorporated to drive the process, hence the GMRC was born. In its presentation, the UN noted that, “This is the first community-driven, integrated development plan prepared in Jamaica and the Caribbean. The project, conceptualised six years ago, was designed to enforce planned development, growth, and protection of coastal resources in the Greater Montego Bay Area (GMBA).

The UN further stated that, “The project is gaining wide credibility as an alternate, broad-based development model for urban and rural towns in Jamaica. It is sustained by a partnership strategy involving community organisations, citizens, the Government, and the private sector.

Objectives were to improve the quality of life through broad-based participatory development; achieve better land and environmental management through improved planning methodologies; and channel social and capital improvement budgets more effectively and efficiently by improving institutional processes and the quality of baseline data available for decision-making. And, most importantly, the plan’s strategies included a sustainable planning of the 17 informal communities — now in the region of 21 and better known as squatter settlements — detailing stronger community-based integration strategies for the base sectors, such as tourism and export manufacturing, through dispersed industrial zones.

The critical thought behind this game-changing plan was that there ought not to be two Montego Bays, one for the tourist and the other for the general citizenry. Unfortunately, funding increasingly became a major issue, which led to a disenchanted Dixon seeking to take “her plan” elsewhere, which led to a major controversy as to who or what entity owned the intellectual property rights.

Against this background, lethargy set in and the final nail in the coffin was hammered when the then town planner panned the Plan, dismissing it as merely an “advocacy document” which would not satisfy the requirements of technical rigour, whatever that means.

Subsequently, no major effort was made to provide the city with a plan until Prime Minister Bruce Golding, after some amount of lobbying, mandated the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) to come up with a plan that would incorporate all of St James. To date, one has not seen a full roll-out of that plan, while there is another highly touted Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) project that is apparently also caught up in bureaucratic entanglements.

Given the current state of social dysfunction in the parish, and more so Montego Bay, which can and will lead to some economic fallout, this writer is amazed that the five Members of Parliament, namely Dr Horace Chang, Edmund Bartlett, Marlene Malahoo Forte, Homer Davis, and Heroy Clarke have not sought to effectively deal with this issue in a collaborative way.

As I wrote then, and I reiterate now, Montego Bay has been bereft of any holistic, comprehensive plan. I am still convinced that if GMBA Development Plan had been fully embraced and implemented (or parts thereof), over time, the city would not be in the mess it is today.

Ironically, it is two of the city’s major economic sectors that have indirectly led to the quandary in which Montego Bay now finds itself — tourism and business process outsourcing (BPO), popularly known as call centres. Readers, in consternation, may ask: How?

Well, over these many decades tourism has been the magnet that has attracted individuals from all across the island in search of the almighty American dollar, and many of these migrants of necessity have had to capture land in order to set up dwellings, hence all those squatter settlements that have become the incubators of criminality and public disorder. In the case of the BPO sector, it was the advent of the call centres that led to lotto scamming (sweepstakes) when employees started selling “sheets” to those who set out to fleece unsuspecting Americans of their savings.

The GMBA Development Plan would have helped to address these issues and nipped the problems in the bud. Instead, a blind eye was turned, foolishly accepting the status quo. Now, things have come to bump, as the old Jamaican saying goes.

What is urgently needed at this time is a summit, coordinated by the St James Municipal Corporation — which, incidentally, is supposed to be the parish’s main planner — and the MBCCI, involving all major stakeholders to chart a realistic and sustainable way forward.

He who fails to plan, plans to fail. Enough said!

Lloyd B Smith has been involved full-time in Jamaican media for the past 45 years. He has also served as a Member of Parliament and Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives. He hails from western Jamaica where he is popularly known as the Governor. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or lbsmith4@gmail.com.