Editorial | Swaby missing the plot

Andrew Swaby may have only lately become aware of the plan for a used car dealership on WestLake Avenue in the Richmond Park community of St Andrew, over which residents demonstrated on Monday.

But Mr Swaby, the newish chairman of the council, but a long-standing member of the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC), the local government, can’t claim ignorance about the concerns of residents of many of the capital’s older communities of being muscled out of their homes and neighbourhoods by encroaching businesses.

Some of that is because of changed zoning regulations; much is because cavalier interlopers ignore restrictive covenants, gambling that poor residents can’t afford to fight them in court; and a good portion is because, too often, the people who are charged with enforcing the rules, don’t do their jobs properly. That includes Mr Swaby’s council, which is responsible for issuing building permits, and monitoring construction, in the Corporate Area. The KSAMC, like the other parish governments, works in tandem with the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA), which is supposed to ensure that environment regulations are adhered to.

The question for Mr Swaby is what he has done to fix the well-documented problems around the permitting process since he assumed leadership of the KSAMC after February’s local government elections.

In the absence of details of the case, The Gleaner doesn’t declare a specific position on the matter.

FAMILIAR ISSUES

But in broad terms, the issues are familiar.

The residents of WestLake heard that a car mart was coming to their avenue. Like what has happened elsewhere in the community – and in many older communities in the capital – they say, there has been no consultation with them. And they don’t believe they are being heard by the KSAMC.

On Monday, several WestLake residents, joined by others from elsewhere in the community and the adjoining Hagley Park area, demonstrated at the intersection of WestLake and Montgomery avenues.

Some residents, many of them elderly, who have lived in these communities for decades and can’t afford to move, are forced to exist alongside myriad of businesses. These include garages, trucking companies, machine shops, and in one case, a cesspool emptier.

As residents struggle to hold on to their homes, once vibrant middle and lower-middle class communities grow increasingly gritty, as infrastructure deteriorates. In some cases existing infrastructure, designed for residential areas, just can’t carry the demands businesses place on them.

“As soon as they buy the premises, they will cut down the trees and concrete the … (yards), which reduces the water absorption and increases the run-off in the streets, which results in flooding,” said Preston Tabois, the president of the Richmond Park Development Committee.

Complaints like these are common across the Corporate Area – not only in places like Richmond Park, Hagley Park and Eastwood Park Gardens. It happens too in better-heeled communities, where sprawling bungalows, under pressure from increased room density ratios, give way to high-rise apartments and commercial complexes.

In many instances, developers begin to build before applying to the courts for changes to restrictive covenants. Or they may flout environmental and/or building permits.

NOT PERMISSIBLE

Or, as the courts have ruled in a number of cases in recent years, the regulators grant permits outside of what is permissible in law, or, for some reason, fail to perform their oversight obligations. Or seem to do so incompetently.

Indeed, in a 2021 ruling, a case where a developer built more than the permissible number of rooms for the size of the lot, Supreme Court judge, Natalie Hart Hines, accused the KSAMC and NEPA of being “dilatory in their mandate to enforce local planning laws and regulations and to promote sustainable development, in respect of the building situated in the property”.

In a more recent matter, the Integrity Commission assailed the same two agencies for signing off on the construction of an apartment complex where there were major variances from building permits, as well as late, after-the-fact flagging breaches of environmental regulations.

In the aftermath of the IC report, Delroy Williams, Mr Swaby’s predecessor as head of the KSAMC, announced an audit of the corporation’s regulatory system to bring greater transparency to the process. Mr Williams made similar pledges after a previous scandal.

Mr Swaby has been in a job for five months, which is sufficient time for him to pronounce on the status of that project, as well as to set the tone for his leadership of the council.

He should, by now, be well into a new, accountable approach to development of the city. At least, those that rely on the regulatory system of which the KSAMC has control – including used car lots in Richmond Park.

Frankly, this newspaper does not sense that anything has changed, in any aspect of governance, under Swaby. The window for him to still change gears is fast dissipating.