THE EDITOR, Sir:
THERE HAS been a constant stream of news articles in the Jamaican media over the past few years lamenting the gross untimeliness/sluggishness of central government in the repair of numerous community roads. This repair time-based inefficiency on the part of the cumbersome central government bureaucracy has resulted in increased repair costs, the need for higher taxes to cover the increased costs incurred due to the untimely repair of roads and immeasurable human suffering in terms of reduced transportation efficiency.
A solution is to use the relatively large and varied range of taxable geography-based industrial resources in Jamaica's three counties within a highly focused and specialised system of local government (infrastructure maintenance) service delivery. In other words, Jamaica's government structure would experience increased levels of spatial (functional) specialisation; one in which central government undertakes the construction and maintenance of national infrastructure, while the island's counties would oversee the specific repair and maintenance of community-based roads and certain pre-identified public infrastructure within the guidelines of a GIS-driven county general plan.
Parish and town councils would thus focus on the cleaning and beautification of given public infrastructure; all in conjunction with their counties and central government as needed. Much of Jamaica's dilapidated public infrastructure can be traced to the island's highly centralised and cumbersome (colonially structured) system of unitary governance; one in which the nationwide infrastructure maintenance capacity of central government has become increasingly unfocused/strained, thus resulting in (financially) costly, extended maintenance cycle timelines for a range of public infrastructure (including community roads).
The increased fiscal cost of the given increase in the maintenance cycle timeline of public infrastructure is due directly to spatial administrative "bottlenecks" in the prioritisation and distribution of increasingly scarce resources on a highly competitive and spatially unfocused nation-wide basis. Spatial administrative division of labour in government (re: fiscally strong and functionally focused county councils) is a solution to Jamaica's infrastructural maintenance woes that should be properly explored.
I am, etc.,
G.O. WHITTAKER
garfield.whittaker@csun.edu
Department of Geography
California State University,
Northridge, Los Angeles
Via Go-Jamaica
