A NEW slant on Local Government reform has been offered in two letters to the Editor published last Saturday and today on the Letters Page opposite.
Both Letters of the Day advocate incorporating the counties - Cornwall, Middlesex, and Surrey - in the structure of government islandwide on the basis, presumably, that as regional entities they serve no practical purpose.
The Saturday letter from Garfield Whittaker of the Department of Geography, California State University in Los Angeles, makes the point that although Jamaica in gaining independence in 1962 had adopted the Westminster model of centralised governance, the counties are not part of the structure as they are in England. County Councils in England, he said, are vibrant parts of the geopolitical administrative structure.
In today's contribution, Wayne Webb, president and CEO of an immigrant assistance organisation in the Bronx, New York, has added to the debate with forthright proposals advocating the abolition of the present Parish Councils and replacing them with an amalagam of Members of Parliament and Parish Councillors sitting in County Councils.
Both letter writers argue that the new formulations would eliminate waste and duplication of effort. Mr. Webb goes even further, suggesting that the number of MPs and Councillors could be reduced and much of the current political tribalism eliminated.
The proposals summarised here should at last spark some new thinking on the much touted Local Government reform which has seen little of practical change. At the political level Parish Councils have served as a first tier of ill-defined training for aspirants to parliamentary office. Hence the jubilation at the JLP sweep of the recent Local Government elections, widely seen as pointing to similar success at the national level.
Viewed in another light the Opposition Party's Local Government victory is good for the two-party system at both local and national levels; but some negative elements persist, as in the failure to reach compromise over the differences between the Mayor and Secretary of the St. James Parish Council. Widening the scope of existing structures, as our letter writers suggest, might provide an answer to old models in need of reform.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
