Editorial | What the corporations must do

When the dust finally settles from Monday’s municipal elections and the local government councillors take their seats, the 2016 Local Governance Act, and related legislation, should be required reading for each member, on which they are tested.

Indeed, the local government ministry, with respect to each council, and the political parties in relation to their representatives, should organise serious workshops and training sessions about the laws, the powers and responsibilities of councils and the role of individual councillors. Further, civil society organisations, including the press, should bring a new scrutiny to the operations of the municipal corporations.

The councils and their leaders, if they possess ambition, should welcome and promote this new transparency, seeing it as an opportunity to assert the value of local government and to extricate themselves from the stifling control of central government, and from under the thumbs of members of parliament (MPs).

Indeed, this stab at independence would be in keeping with the suggestion of Prime Minister Andrew Holness of the need for more assertive representation of their divisions by councillors, and the clear policy declarations by the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) in its manifesto on the eve of the elections, including the promise to establish “a robust framework of accountability in local government”.

FUNDING LEASH

Jamaica has had a system of local government going back centuries. But its modern, largely perished-based form, through its several iterations, is nearly 160 years old. Since 2015, the concept of local government has been entrenched in the island’s Constitution.

The idea, fundamentally, is to bring decision-making, especially with respect to the delivery of community-type services – including the maintenance of some roads and ensuring cleanliness and good public health – closer to people who consume those services. Significantly, too, the municipal authorities are responsible for issuing building permits, which ostensibly gives them a big say in the approval and management of infrastructure development.

But as this newspaper has often pointed out, the municipal authorities, in part because of its control of the bulk of their funding, have been made to operate like the bastard children of central government. At least, their independence is circumscribed by the funding leash.

The councils, despite the intention of reform efforts, are further weakened by limited expectations the political parties have placed on divisional representatives, except to be majordomos and factotums to the members of parliament for the constituencies in which their council divisions exist. It is the MPs who generally have direct control of resources or the influence with those in authority who can get significant things done. This lord and vassal-style relationship tended to be reinforced by the quality of the candidates chosen in recent decades to contest local government elections, although there are signs, especially in the recent elections, that this may be shifting.

ESTABLISH A RANGE OF COMMITTEES

But the political and institutional constraints notwithstanding, the municipal corporations, if their leaders have the ambition and are willing to exercise their authority under the law, are not without leverage.

First, the Local Governance Act calls on the corporations to “promote, establish and utilise appropriate mechanisms to facilitate participation of, or collaboration or networking with, all relevant stakeholders who exist or operate within” the areas of their jurisdiction. These stakeholders include parish and community development committees, which, if working with ambitious local government leaders, can be non-partisan, countervailing forces against an intransigent central government.

The law also allows for the authorities to establish a range of committees of which up to half of the appointees can be non-council members, who have a voice, but not a vote.

In addition to the committees that can be set up at the discretion of the leadership, the legislation demands the appointment of finance committees, whose jobs include “the management of the financial affairs” of the corporations and city municipalities. Up to half of these committees can be non-council members. They must also have local public accounts committees (LAPC), half of whose members can be selected from outside the councils. Alternatively, the independent members can be a third of the committees, if one-third of the membership is also from the minority party. Importantly, the chair of LAPC, a part of whose job is “to determine whether accountability, transparency and ethical standards are being observed”, must be a non-elected member.

Even without more, merely following rules in accordance with the letter and spirit of the law should improve accountability. However, this would be further enhanced if PNP-controlled councils, as promised by the party, regularly publish their budgets and budget outcomes, as well as regularly brief citizens about things that are being done and the status of their implementation. All the municipal corporations should adopt this plan.

The new councils should also, immediately on assuming office, order a redesign of their website to which they should also post their budgets, with features to allow citizens to track expenditure, project implementation and decisions taken by the corporations. Applicants for services, including building permits, should, on these websites, be able to follow their applications through each decision-making process. It is unfathomable that the existing sites provide bare-bones information about the municipal corporations, and that the latest news post on the one for Hanover was for November 12, 2015.

Building websites such as proposed is not an expensive exercise, and it cannot be too much when the auditor general has to qualify the financial accounts for several corporations, going back more than a decade, because they cannot properly account for how they spent billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.