Editorial | Hold the vandals to account

Three things must now happen.

First, Matthew Samuda, as the responsible minister, should demand that the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA), and the other agencies involved, give a full, truthful and step-by-step account of developments leading to the environmental waste that has been made of Fort Rocky.

Second, NEPA, as the administrative arm of the Natural Resources and Conservation Authority (NRCA), should be required to produce a credible plan to improve its oversight of the country’s environmental assets, at which it has, too regularly, been found wanting.

Third, since neither NEPA nor any of the other agencies involved in the débâcle is likely to be aggressive in holding the people involved to account, the Standing Parliament Committee that deals with social and physical development and the infrastructure should, using the Fort Rocky incident as its platform, urgently convene hearings into the consistent failure of the island’s environmental, planning and regulatory agencies to properly do their jobs.

It would be welcome, too, if, separate to anything done by the Government and its agencies, private stakeholders found a way to test in the courts whether the agencies involved in the Fort Rocky débâcle failed in, or did not properly fulfil, their administrative responsibilities, and can be sanctioned therefor. Perhaps they could find support from the public defender.

HERITAGE SITE

Port Royal is a small community on a tombolo in the eastern section of Kingston Harbour, connected to the mainland by a narrow spit. Its global reputation is as the rambunctious, 17th-century town where English pirates, including Henry Morgan, congregated, and from where they set out to raid Spanish treasure ships heading to home from the Americas. That was until 1692, when a large chunk of Port Royal was swallowed by the sea after an earthquake and tsunami.

For more than two centuries afterwards, though, Port Royal remained a British naval base in colonial Jamaica.

The Jamaica National Heritage Trust lists five forts at Port Royal. Fort Rocky, built in 1888, is one of them. This fort, like the others, is a heritage site.

But there is a larger picture. Port Royal is a protected area, covering over 8,600 hectares on land, including mangroves, and sea. The designation means that the area is considered to have “an unusual combination of elements of the natural environment that is of aesthetic, educational, historical, or scientific interest”.

Indeed, NEPA describes the Port Royal Protected Area as containing “a diverse range of habitats and species”.

“It plays a key role in food security, economic opportunity, carbon sequestration, barrier and mitigation against the effects of natural hazards, cultural/ heritage, recreation, ecological research,” a NEPA online document adds.

It is, in part, the effort to exploit the economic potential of Port Royal that led to the current contretemps over Fort Rocky. The Government, via its culture and entertainment ministry, is developing a number of entertainment zones – places where big, loud shows can be held well into the night without communities complaining about breaches of the Noise Abatement Act. Fort Rocky, a few kilometres short of the Port Royal town centre, is to be one of the planned venues. It is supposed to host its first major show in two days.

POLICING OBLIGATIONS

It would be expected that any significant development in a protected area would be subjected to an environmental impact assessment, which NRCA/NEPA can demand to be done. There is no available evidence that one was either asked for, or done in this case, although government officials suggest that various permits were applied for, and discussions held between critical agencies and key stakeholders. It is not clear who held these meetings, when, and with whom.

What is known is that a large patch of Fort Rocky’s dry tropical forest has been razed, its dunes flattened, to make way for a parking lot. Officials have implied that work ran ahead of the formal issuance of relevant permits, but on whose orders has not been disclosed.

The Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation, whose leader declared ignorance of the advance of the project, and NEPA have reportedly issued stop orders. Government officials appear to be in a scramble to rectify the mess and assuage stakeholders.

Such vandalism against the natural environment, or government oversight agencies falling down on their jobs, is not infrequent. Neither is this callousness new to Port Royal.

Indeed, in recent times the courts and the anti-corruption watchdog, the Integrity Commission, have lectured NEPA for failing to properly fulfil its policing obligations in issuing permits, or in ensuring that developers adhere to the terms of the licences.

Only three years ago, there was attention on the failure of the authorities to properly manage the regrowth of mangroves along the Palisadoes road – on the spit from Kingston to the Norman Manley International Airport near Port Royal – which were planted to replace those removed when the road was raised and widened a decade earlier.

Development is not only about big highways and high-rise buildings, or macroeconomic stability. The state of the environment matters, too, in well-rounded development.