THE CALL from the President of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce, Winston Dear, to clean up the city of Montego Bay and other towns across the island must be taken seriously.We cannot expect structured growth and development of our cities and rural towns if we do not pay attention to the supporting infrastructure to encourage private sector investment.
Thursday's call by Mr. Dear has been made time and time again by concerned citizens in the tourism capital. One such person is the immediate past president of the Chamber, Mark Kerr-Jarrett, who has been very vocal in trying to bring the Government's attention to the city's plight.
The fact is that the dirty roads, the garbage, the traffic congestion, and lack of parking, and the ad hoc transport system have been growing problems for quite sometime in Montego Bay and other parish capitals. Temporary band-aids have been put on the wounds from time to time, but we are yet to see any concrete proposals for a long-term solution. Some attention is being placed on the deteriorating state of the island's capital, Kingston, but what is urgently needed is a plan to deal with the decaying state of all capitals and towns, if we are to halt the drift from these areas to the cities, with the attendant problems.
The current state of many capitals is a disgrace. The lack of focus here will result in a proliferation of ghost towns across the country, as suggested by Mr. Dear. Let us incorporate all parish capitals into the Prime Minister's Urban Renewal Project, being implemented by the National Housing Trust and the Urban Development Corporation, as a matter of urgency.
There is a lot of development taking place in Montego Bay for example, but with all this the city still lacks a consistent programme of maintenance. A prime example is the new multi-million dollar Civic Centre, which stands in Sam Sharpe Square in all its splendour, surrounded by filthiness. There are businesses in the same vicinity, whose employees have to walk over homeless people almost every day in order to enter the building.
Earlier this year, Government and private sector officials met at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and identified tourism as the main economic vehicle which will take the country forward. However, if the Government is serious about tourism, then certainly one of its main focuses must be to beautify and maintain the tourism capital, and other resort towns as a start.
It is true that the businesses in these resort towns should play a role in the clean-up of these areas. The Government, however, has a vested interest in sustaining the economic mainstay of the country, and therefore must take the lead in this regard.
