PNP seeks to dump Lucea mayor

WESTERN BUREAU:

LUCEA MAYOR Sheridan Samuels is among sitting councillors the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) will seek to replace for the impending local government elections, The Gleaner has learnt.

Samuels, who chairs the Hanover Municipal Corporation, is also the councillor for the Cauldwell division and incumbent local government representative for the Grange Hill division in Westmoreland.

When asked about the development on Monday, Samuels expressed surprise.

“I am not aware of that,” said Samuels, when The Gleaner spoke with him in a telephone interview about his party’s intention to replace him.

“I was not officially informed about anything like that,” he added.

Information reaching The Gleaner indicates that Councillor Lawton ‘Jimmy’ McKenzie will also be dumped. According to a source, who is close to the PNP’s secretariat, the party has conducted two separate polls and found weaknesses in the leadership of Samuels and McKenzie, who were both first elected in 2003.

INTEGRITY OF THE RESULTS

Both Samuels and McKenzie are reportedly trailing their political opponents and projected to lose their seat in the upcoming local government elections.

Samuels questioned the integrity of the poll results.

“From which pollster, who is the pollster?”, he retorted. “I can’t answer any questions at this time.”

When contacted on the matter, deputy general secretary of the PNP, Wentworth Skeffery, refused to confirm or deny the replacement of Samuels as their standard-bearer in the Cauldwell division in Hanover Western and McKenzie in the Grange Hill division in Westmoreland Western.

“I am not going to speak about the party’s action. The party is doing its internal thing. Anything you want, speak to the general secretary. I am not going to speak with the media on party issues,” Skeffery told The Gleaner on Monday.

Samuels, who was first elected councillor for the Cauldwell division in 2003, handsomely won the local government elections in 2016 by a margin of 326 over his closest rival, Roland Gooden of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), with 851 votes against Gooden’s 425 votes.

There were two other independent candidates who ran in that seat, with both taking a combination of 530 votes. Keith Donaldson got 328 votes, while Dalton Spence picked up 202.

The poll results involving Samuels were not shared with The Gleaner, but for the other sitting councillor, McKenzie, in Grange Hill, Westmoreland, the data showed that most of the voters in the division are “angry” with his leadership.

Fifty-one per cent say they are angry, four per cent are very angry and 45 per cent are pleased with him.

When the leadership of McKenzie was measured against his JLP opponent, Basil Thompson, the poll showed that McKenzie would lose the seat and would only receive 47 per cent of the votes against Thompson’s 53 per cent, if an election were to be held today.

In the 2016 local government elections, McKenzie won the seat by a margin of 42 votes after polling 892 to Thompson’s 850, from a total of 1,760 electors.

Local government elections, which should have been held in November of 2020, were postponed and an amendment was approved by Parliament to temporarily modify the Representation of The People Act (ROPA), to allow the local government elections to be pushed back to a date no later than February 27, 2022.

The eighth schedule of the ROPA provides for a period of extension which is 90 days, commencing on the day after the fourth anniversary of the date on which the most recent election was held. This would allow for the next local government elections to be held no later than February 2022.