Councillors peeved as several street lights still in disrepair across capital city
Published:Friday | January 13, 2023 | 12:21 AMAinsworth Morris/Staff Reporter
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Members of the minority caucus of the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC) have expressed dissatisfaction with a response from CEO Robert Hill regarding hundreds of street lights which remain dysfunctional across the Corporate Area...
Members of the minority caucus of the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC) have expressed dissatisfaction with a response from CEO Robert Hill regarding hundreds of street lights which remain dysfunctional across the Corporate Area.
Six months after a resolution was at the KSAMC to seek the intervention of the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) to repair the hundreds of lights, primarily those along the Sir Florizel Glasspole Highway, the problem remains unaddressed with the company saying that it was not responsible for those bulbs and repairs in question.
At the KSAMC’s monthly meeting on Tuesday, Hill briefly told councillors that the matter was referred to the Roads and Traffic Committee.
This was in response to questions previously posed by Andrew Swaby, minority leader and the councillor for the Vineyard Town Division, following the JPS’s release.
Swaby and Norman Gardens Division Councillor Jacqueline Lewis, who supported him in tabling the July 2022 motion, were not satisfied with Hill’s response.
When they had tabled the motion seven months ago, Swaby and Lewis had expressed hopes that the street lights would have been repaired in time for the Jamaica 60 celebrations. The motion received support from both sides of the municipal corporation.
Swaby had complained that roughly three-quarters of the bulbs along the Sir Florizel Glasspole Highway were not working, while Lewis said that some 80 in her division were not lit at night.
Swaby told The Gleaner on Tuesday that he had sent the questions to the leadership of the KSAMC in September 2022, so he was not pleased with Hill’s response some four months later.
“I had submitted some questions regarding the street lights. They were mainly the ones on the Palisadoes Road, the ones on Sir Florizel Glasspole Boulevard, [and] the ones on Marcus Garvey [Drive]. I moved the resolution about fixing those lights because those lights are actually the gateway into the city,” Swaby told The Gleaner.
He said that, when the JPS later said that it was not in charge of those lights, he asked the company to state exactly which lights it is – or not – in charge of.
“ ... And I asked [about] the cost for each that the KSAMC pays to JPS every month for these lights, so those are just some simple questions asked,” adding that he also asked for details of the necessary procedure to have lights said to be under the management of the UDC (Urban Development Corporation) placed under the KSAMC’s purview instead.
Lewis lamented that the problem has been lingering for too long.
“It’s really a hazard going into my division, and it’s really dark [at nights]. It’s going about two years now that we have been asking the JPS and the KSAMC to fix the lights ... . All we can hear is that ‘It’s not KSAMC’s light; it is, in fact, somebody else’s lights’. So we are still waiting for those lights to be fixed,” the councillor told The Gleaner.