— Town Clerk Royston King
TOWN Clerk Royston King has made it clear that City Hall has not granted any permission to the Ministry of Education to do extensive rehabilitation work on the Dorothy Bailey Health Centre.
King told City Councillors earlier this week that he had observed in the press that the ministry advertised to commence such work about three weeks ago. He said no permission was granted because of the centre’s strong historical significance and it being a part of the National Trust reservoir.
King also pointed out that the ministry has sent a letter to Deputy Mayor Sherod Duncan seeking permission for the said work. Mayor Patricia Chase-Green expressed her dismay that the ministry sought to go through Duncan instead of her or the Town Clerk.
“I am surprised they took this channel. I received a call from the ministry and I told them to check with the Town Clerk’s office. They never called back. They bypassed the Town Clerk and ignored me completely. Those protocols we cannot accept.”
The Mayor noted that any letter of application should go to the Town Clerk.
“How on earth a ministry can go ahead without written consent?” she asked and urged King to call an urgent meeting to bring closure to this matter. Meanwhile, the Deputy Mayor, in an invited comment, told this publication that the team met with him when the Mayor was on her trip to Mexico and Panama, and that he did not grant any approval.
“They said to me that the previous Mayor had given them a tacit agreement that they could have gone to do their expansion and renovation work there. They were under the impression that he would have done the necessary work in-house to ensure that goes through, but that wasn’t done. So they went ahead to publish their rehabilitation work and so forth. So that is where the confusion came about that when they came here there was no record of us ever making those overtures to them,” Duncan said.
During the statutory meeting, Duncan had told King that he did not grant any approval, because he was aware of what his role is at the City Council.
