FOURTH DELAY
Gov’t to push for another postponement of local gov’t polls in House today
Published:Tuesday | February 21, 2023 | 1:23 AMErica Virtue/Senior Gleaner Writer
With no budgetary provision in fiscal year 2023-2024, and no time left to meet the end-of-February timeline, the Holness administration will today officially seek another postponement of local government elections.
The Representation of the People (Postponement of Elections to Municipal Corporations and City Municipalities) Act is to be tabled in Parliament this afternoon.
Today’s sitting is a rare one, falling between the ceremonial opening of Parliament and tabling of the Estimates of Expenditure and the holding and conclusion of the Standing Finance Committee meetings.
Leader of Government Business Edmund Bartlett maintains that the sitting is a “normal” meeting of elected representatives, while his Opposition counterpart, Phillip Paulwell, says the administration has found itself in a legislative mess which has resulted in the breaking of a custom which has held for decades.
But Bartlett said the meeting is doing the people’s business.
“The House can meet any time it has the business of the nation to discharge, and we adjourned last Tuesday for Tuesday 21st February and the agenda will include presentation and debate of the act to temporarily modify the Representation of the People Act [to delay the local government polls],” Bartlett, who is the country’s tourism minister, told The Gleaner on Monday.
He advised that the Budget, when tabled, goes to the auditor general for review over a two-week period, after which it is received by the Standing Finance Committee for detailed consideration, usually over three days. A report is sent to the next sitting of the House, after which debate commences, led by the minister of finance.
“So the House is meeting in the normal way tomorrow,” Bartlett insisted.
But, according to Paulwell, only “extraordinary” circumstances would cause the Government to meet between the main events. That “extraordinary” circumstance, he said, was the need to seek further postponement of the local government elections.
“The Government has been caught flat-footed. It is quite unusual that before we go into Standing Finance Committee, which is scheduled for the first and second of March, that we are called back now. It’s a legislative mess. We can only be meeting tomorrow (Tuesday) to seek a further extension of the elections ... ,” he told The Gleaner. “We are playing with the laws. If the House didn’t meet tomorrow (Tuesday), the Government would be breaking its own laws.”
With no financial provisions in the Budget, unless allocations are made in subsequent Supplementary Estimates, another year will elapse before the elections are held. This could push the polls within a year of the due date for the next general election, which is constitutionally due in 2025.
Local government elections have traditionally been used to gauge political temperature for general elections.
Director of Elections Glasspole Brown noted that several divisions are currently without representation. “by virtue of death, resignation and migration”.
The 15 divisions include those previously represented by four members of parliament – Hugh Graham, Krystal Lee, Homer Davis and George Wright – who vacated their councillor posts after they were elected to Gordon House in September 2020. However, mayors are responsible for the unmanned divisions in addition to their own, Brown said.
The country last had local government elections in November 2016. Constitutionally due every four years, the next polls were postponed in November 2020 for three months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In February 2021, the Parliament extended the delay by a further 12 months, making them due by February 27, 2022.
Last January, the House of Representatives approved the Representation of the People (Postponement of Elections to Municipal Corporations and City Municipalities) Act, 2022 before the Senate also approved the postponement for a further 12 months. Based on that postponement, the polls should have been held no later than February 2023.
The Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), the Opposition and several constituents in the vacant divisions have expressed concern over the delays, saying the elections are essential to the process of good governance and democracy in Jamaica.
“ ... These elections should not be delayed any further,” the PSOJ said in a recent release.