Colin Gager, who is head of the Trelawny local government, last week, blamed its failure to deliver better services in the parish, in part, on his inability to collect property taxes, for which the delinquency rate is high, as it is across Jamaica.

Trelawny, however, is worse than anywhere else. By Mr Gager's estimate, in the last fiscal year the parish council collected only about 19 per cent of the property taxes it believes was due to it - that is, a mere $17 million of a projected $90 million or more. This, of course, is bad business, for parish councils run their affairs primarily with the money collected in property taxes and the two-thirds of the licence fee for motor vehicles remitted to them by central government.

Mr Gager in his complaint about the lack of civic responsibility of taxpayers, which is implied by his lament, missed a fundamental point or two, perhaps. The first is that the shortfall in property taxes is more likely to be a statement about the competence, or lack thereof, of the Trelawny Parish Council and its bosses than it is about the attitude of taxpayers.

Lack of efficacy

The second, and related point, has to do with the utter lack of efficacy of the local government system, as it is now conceived, and the need for what exists to be abandoned on the scrap heap of overworked bad ideas. Indeed, we are all suffering from local-government-reform fatigue, which seems more like a synonym for maintaining an ossified, lazy and ineffectual bureaucracy.

Paying property taxes, or any taxes, is not easy in Jamaica, except, perhaps, for those withheld at the source of a transaction, in which case the difficulty becomes someone else's responsibility. Property tax information is often inconsistent, analyses and review processes weak, management inefficient, slow and ... well, bureaucratic. It is for Mr Gager, as the boss of the council with the lowest ratio of property tax collection among all parishes, to fix these problems in his own authority.

That is not just about 'hunting down' taxpayers, as Mr Gager seems to think. Improving service delivery would help. This starts with the hard work of thinking creatively, followed by sound management.

Absence of strong leadership

But there are other problems with local government, why Mr Gager cannot deliver the volume and or the quality of services deserved by his constituency. Yet, even with the limited resources, the local government authorities, Mr Gager's included, cannot claim to be delivering value for money. It is unfortunate that too many parish councillors see themselves as conduits for members of parliament in the delivery of limited spoils to constituents. The absence of strong leadership and skilled management and the absence of a clear system of accountability undermine capacity.

It would make sense to implement a system for a weighted rating of local governments, measuring performance in areas such as timeliness and quality of service delivery against benchmark targets. There would be periodic reporting on performance by a credible authority.

The next step would be to dismantle the current authorities and group them into regional bodies run by professional municipal managers, who would report to an elected council of four or five members. It is time to disengage from a slothful and untidy process.

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