THE EDITOR, Sir:
THE ONGOING scandal within the National Solid Waste Management Agency (NSWMA) affords a profound insight into the lack of operational transparency as well as general accountability and more direct grassroots control of highly centralised (national) bureaucracies.
As an academic with special research interest in the spatial structure of government, I have long argued in the Jamaican media that the island's excessively centralised approach to the governance of scarce fiscal resources (a legacy in part of an 1866 crown colony edict) can at times result in critical diseconomies of scale, a reality that thus precipitates the opposite of anticipated fiscal savings.
One example of bureaucratic diseconomies can be seen in the tendencies for the wasteful opaqueness displayed by such highly centralised agencies as the NSWMA.
In essence, excessively centralised government bureaucracies like the NSWMA (which tend to be sluggish and insensitive in the spatial prioritisation of increasingly scarce resources on a national scale) should be regionally rationalised in order to provide more timely, cost-saving service delivery to the island's 2000-odd communities.
Such spatial rationalisation would see roughly 700 communities receiving specialised administrative attention from fiscally empowered and functionally focused (grassroots controlled) regional county councils.
A regional approach to the decentralisation of some local government functions is of economic/administrative value to Jamaica's struggling economy, given that the excessive decentralisation being generally proposed along the more narrow and spatially fragmented parish council and/or community council lines will only serve to significantly heighten waste and in the process drive up the rate of grassroots taxation.
PROPOSAL
Hence, in an effort to contain and reduce local government administrative costs (via increased time-sensitive, spatial, administrative focus) this article puts forth the proposal that the more expensive and capital-intensive local government service delivery functions (such as community road repair and garbage collection), be devolved to regional county councils.
Jamaica's three counties offer a unique spatial administrative configuration given their inherent economic size/resource diversity and attendant potential tax base: realities that offer their respective parishes and central government an invaluable intermediary body with which to partner in terms of promoting heightened spatial administrative focus, grassroots sensitive service and attendant savings from more timely local government service delivery/consumption.
Given the justified concern in some quarters that county government would create yet another tier of waste and corrupt politicians, concerted effort should be taken to carefully design the county administration towards an open, transparent, post-modernist structure: one managed by a clearly articulated county general plan or blueprint of governance.
Thus, in pursuing administrative savings and political accountability, county government would utilise both parish councillors and members of Parliament on its board.
SELECTION CRITERIA
For further transparency, these elected officials would be joined (under the guidelines of rewritten constitutional law) by a prescribed number of selected representatives from such key civil society-based pressure groups as: local or regional chambers of commerce; taxi associations; combined service clubs; and the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, among others.
Criteria for county government selection could be based on either absolute membership numbers or the extent to which the respective organisation impacts the regional county economy.
Grassroots-controlled spatial structures of governance, ones that seek to foster proactive problem-solving participation from a wider cross-section of Jamaica's population, are of critical value if Jamaica is to pull itself from its current quagmire of inade-quate/disorganised resource management, developmental decay and ultimately, paralysing levels of crime, the latter dysfunction being fostered by criminal dons filling the social administrative vacuum in part created by Jamaica's weak/inefficient system of local government.
I am, etc.,
GARFIELD O. WHITTAKER
garfield.whittaker@csun.edu
Department of Geography
California State University
