Editorial | Cataleptic Delroy Williams

Don't, they say, speak ill of the dead, which might have taken Delroy Williams, the mayor of Kingston, off the hook. Except that his death is only metaphoric, and, if it were real, would be akin to a recurring case of catalepsy, or the Lazarus phenomenon.

For, every so often Mr Williams is aroused and goes on about something. Recently, it was co-ordination between the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSMC), of which he is chairman, and central government agencies to ensure the timely delivery of development permits. But he soon falls back into his natural state of narcolepsy, cognitive hibernation, or other conditions that characterise his administration of the municipality. Mayor Williams, in that sense, is not much different than his recent predecessor, except that Desmond McKenzie, whose talent for frenetic movement and assembly line chatter, unfortunately, didn't translate into credible performance.

It may be possible, though, that things can be got on within the city without Mr Williams, especially if other arms of government appropriate the authority and perform the functions that, rightly, are the remit of the KSMC. The new police unit, the Public Safety and Traffic Enforcement Branch (PSTEB), in that regard, has provided an example.

When Mr Williams' party won the majority in the KSMC and he became mayor of the capital and spouted the usual pap about transforming Kingston into a mega-city and making it "the capital of the Caribbean, the pearl of the Antilles and a major player on the Latin American landscape", we applied the formula of discounting his remarks and giving him the benefit of the doubt.

We understood that most of the residents of the KSMA and the Kingston metropolitan region would be reasonably happy that they were able to live in a reasonably clean environment, with a little less ramshackle and a bit more social order.

That is why on December 18, 2016, we, in these columns, exhorted Mr Williams to "embrace the idea of doing the little things and getting them right, like pruning the ficus planted on the sidewalks of downtown Kingston's main streets and having the city cleaned of the squalor with which it is overwhelmed".

Two years on, the trees remain overgrown, untidy and hazardous; the disorder that characterised the downtown commercial district, and other urban centres, remain the same; verges are unkempt; drains continue to be blocked with refuse; and the collection of garbage is still sporadic.

Worse, despite Mr Williams' declaration, during one of his periods of animation, of creating a "smart future" for Kingston, citizens have no clear idea of what he means by this, and there is no plan from the mayor and his council for how they will accomplish the basics, at least none that has been coherently articulated.

HAlF-WAY TREE CLEAN-UP

All, however, may not be lost. Last month Calvin Allen, the senior superintendent of police who heads the PSTEB, spearheaded an operation to clean up Half-Way Tree, a squalid, chaos-driven, but important urban hub in the Corporate Area. Significantly, that effort, though overseen by SSP Allen, was not general policing. It included the Fire Brigade hosing down significant swathes of the town centre.

"The area has been heavily stenched with human waste, mostly urine, which has resulted in a health hazard in areas of Half-Way Tree," Mr Allen lamented. "Part of what we do at PSTEB is to collaborate with public order and the safety of our people in mind."

The now-squalid, municipality-sanctioned vending kiosks, as well as follow-along shacks, still dominate the walkways of Half-Way Tree, and buses and taxes still defy the law on where and how they park and drop off and pick up passengers. But SSP Allen was clearly on to something. Maybe he can sell the idea to Mr Williams, assuming he can awaken and prise the rigor mortis out of the mayor.