Editorial | Hanover MC as metaphor

Sheridan Samuels, like anyone else, deserves sympathy for the fact that his health may have suffered from having to work in a sick building.

But that Mr Samuels, by his own account, has also suffered doesn’t absolve the chairman of the Hanover municipal council from his obligation to have acted earlier, and more aggressively, to deal with the problem at the old municipal building.

Indeed, the matter is not only about the mould and unseen pathogens at the facility, which the western parish’s medical officer of health, Dr Kaushal Singh, reported on at last week’s monthly meeting of the council. It has to do also with the decrepitude and squalor, or as Dr Singh put it in his report, the “structural defects and/or unsanitary conditions” of the building, about which the municipal corporation’ staff has long grumbled.

Mr Samuels will no doubt retort that the real problem is the inadequacy of resources; that the Hanover Municipal Corporation does not have sufficient money to properly maintain the building; and that, ideally, the structure should be completely gutted and overhauled. Or they may argue for a new building elsewhere.

While these are all pertinent considerations, they really would be diversions from the immediate situation, which is a reflection of the long-standing, and ongoing, failure of the Hanover council, like other local government bodies across the island, to properly manage its affairs.

The corporations generally suck at doing the little things, such as ensuring that drains are cleaned, verges are trimmed and public markets and buildings are maintained. Worse, they display a general lack of imagination to embrace big ideas. Indeed, in their operation, the local government authorities lag far behind the aspirations for them to be critically engaged drivers of community development, as set out in the Local Governance Act of 2016.

COME TO TERMS

Put another way, the municipal councils are, for the most part, yet to come to terms with their agency. So, councillors perceive their roles in a context of vassalship to, or as praetorian guards of, the parliamentarians or parliamentary aspirants of their party in whose constituencies their municipal divisions fall.

Perhaps the most revealing metaphor of the Hanover Municipal Authority, emphasising its frozen status, is a photograph of a man in mayoral garb on the front page of its website under a section headed ‘Featured News’.

The picture is not of Mayor Samuels, but of his predecessor, Wynter McIntosh. The news which it accompanies dates to May 2015 and has to do with removing stray animals from the parish. There are no up-to-date stories on the site, which, but for the current councillors and top officials, appears not to have been updated in nine years.

It’s hardly surprising in that context than when Dr Singh reported on the state of the Hanover municipal building what it appeared to have elicited from Mayor Samuels was an eureka moment about a recent bout of illness.

“We are getting sick,” Mr Samuels said. “And by we, I am included in it.”

He added: “I am deeply concerned for the staff members, and I feel it for them. Every section within this building is not conducive for working.”

But perhaps even more telling was the observation by Mr Samuels, who is in second term as chairman of the council, that “this situation has been going on like that for a very long time”.

A pertinent question for Mr Samuels is what, apart from having reported the findings of the parish health authorities to the central government, did he do with the knowledge that he presumably possessed “for a long time”.

BEEN AWARE

Even if he did not know about the pathogens, he ought to have been aware of the leaking roof, falling plaster from ceilings, and the use of garbage bins to catch the water from leaks. These, like other visible problems, result from lack of basic maintenance, which often doesn’t require a lot of money.

If this is the environment in which the municipal corporation’s staff worked, and their bosses appeared not to have been overly exercised by that, it begs the question of how the council perceived the parish, what picture they carried in their minds of it, and the quality of service they believed its residents deserved and ought to receive.

In that regard, and since the information isn’t on its website and therefore not readily available to the parish’s residents, maybe the Hanover municipal council should declare whether it is in compliance with the law in appointing a Local Public Accounts Committee (LPAC), with non-council members, and chaired by an outsider. That committee is supposed to review the integrity with which the councils manage their fiduciary obligations.

Chairman Samuels might also say whether independent persons have been invited to join the council’s finance committee as contemplated by the legislation, and if it has, as required by the law, held public meetings and engaged with stakeholders in preparing the municipality’s budget for the coming fiscal year.

While we specifically address the Hanover Municipal Corporation, the questions apply to all the local government authorities, especially in the aftermath of last February’s municipal elections. During the campaign the political parties promised a new and better approach to local governance.

Citizens want to cash those promises.