Mammee Bay and the Corridor Battle: Q3 1997 and a Case Study in Access Denial

Briefing

• Mammee Bay development left public beach access functionally inadequate by 1997.
• Advocates documented gap between approval conditions and on-the-ground access reality.
• Community members described being turned away from beach access points by security.
• NRCA cited as responsible for conditions enforcement; agency capacity was limited.
• Case used by NGOs to illustrate systemic access compliance failure pattern.

Mammee Bay in St. Ann was, by the mid-1990s, a developed stretch of north coast where resort and residential development had proceeded to a density that left the bay’s beach frontage substantially privatised in practice. The developments that occupied the bay had received approvals that included conditions concerning public beach access; those conditions existed on paper but the community access they had been intended to secure was not functioning. Members of communities in the area reported that when they attempted to use the access points indicated in approvals documentation, they encountered physical barriers or security personnel who redirected them.

The Mammee Bay situation was not unique along the north coast in 1997, but it was well documented enough to serve as a case study in the systematic failure of the access conditions enforcement mechanism. Environmental NGOs had gathered first-hand accounts from community members, reviewed the approval conditions that existed for the Mammee Bay properties, and assembled a record that showed clearly the gap between the access commitments in the planning documents and the access reality on the ground. The Natural Resources Conservation Authority, when the situation was brought to its attention, acknowledged that enforcement follow-up of access conditions was a systemic weakness in its operations.

The Resource Constraint Explanation

The NRCA’s explanation for the enforcement gap was resource-based: the agency had the regulatory authority to enforce conditions but lacked the staffing to conduct systematic compliance monitoring across the many properties it had issued conditions to. Follow-up site visits for completed developments were not routinely scheduled; they occurred when complaints were received or when the agency’s own inspection programme, operating with limited staff and a large portfolio, reached specific properties. The resource constraint explanation was accurate as far as it went, but it prompted the further question of whether the authority’s resource allocation — and ultimately the government’s budget allocation to it — reflected an appropriate prioritisation of coastal access enforcement.

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