Dean Peart, the Local Government Minister, aware of the long-promised reform of local government, appears to have found an answer in a directly-elected mayor for Kingston and St. Andrew.

Whatever his thinking, Mr. Peart needs to give the citizens of the capital details informing the administration's current views on the structure of the city's local government and what the system should look like generally.

Of course, there are many Jamaicans who believe that the local government system should be scrapped, for the effervescence of Desmond McKenzie and others notwithstanding, the authorities do little other than being second-tier pork barrels. In other words, the whir of Mr. McKenzie in Kingston and St. Andrew ought not to be mistaken for substance and achievement.

Yet, the city's mayor and Victor Cummings of the People's National Party have begun to jockey to become the capital's first directly-elected mayor under some proposal being crafted by Mr. Peart, which the minister hopes to take to Parliament this month. Legislative changes would be completed by April.

So it happened on the eve of the 2002 general election when the then Local Government Minister, Arnold Bertram, had a wide suite of proposals to reform local government - for the umpteenth time.

Among the ideas in Mr. Bertram's package was collapsing the several councils into larger and economically viable regional councils, as well as directly-managed municipal districts. Most of these would have directly-elected mayors and/or city managers. None of it came to pass, except the Portmore hybrid where there is a directly-elected mayor of no great authority and a council that has performed with little credit.

The administration didn't really believe in the proposals which, essentially, were designed to provide a pressured central government with a plausible excuse to delay the municipal poll. Indeed, when Mrs. Simpson Miller succeeded Mr. Bertram, the latter's reform package was placed on hold and the new minister gave the parish councils a year to review the ideas and come up with their own proposals.

It is now more than three years since new local government bodies were elected under the old system, but we are not aware that any of them have submitted reform plans. And they are unlikely to have been asked. Nor has the administration in all that time sought seriously to engage the country on the issue, as Mrs. Simpson Miller promised.

This is hardly surprising. For any such consultation would likely lead to a clamour for decent local government; municipal bodies that get things done and are efficient and transparent in their operation rather than being distributors of political spoils.

Perhaps Mr. Peart's reform will provide an opportunity to scrap the parish councils in favour of competent municipal managers, accountable to the Local Government Ministry and with oversight by an Opposition-led parliamentary committee.