The Corridor That Wasn’t: Q2 2014 and the Long Battle Over Beach Access Compliance

Briefing

• Government audit found majority of resort corridor obligations unfulfilled across the north coast.
• NEPA issued compliance notices to multiple properties in Montego Bay and Negril.
• Fishing communities in St Mary reported continuing blockage of traditional beach paths.
• Tourism ministry resisted enforcement action citing investment climate concerns.
• Rights advocates argued voluntary compliance had permanently failed.

The results of the coastal access compliance audit circulated within government in early 2014 were not publicly released in full — they never have been — but enough details emerged through official statements and advocacy group responses to establish the broad finding: most resort properties along Jamaica’s north coast that were subject to beach access corridor requirements under their development approvals were not meeting those requirements in any meaningful sense. The corridors existed, if at all, as unmarked, unmaintained, and effectively unusable strips of land that gave legal form to a right that could not practically be exercised. The gap between the requirement as written and the reality as experienced by members of the public who tried to reach the beach was vast.

NEPA’s compliance notices in the spring of 2014 named specific properties in Montego Bay and Negril. The notices did not specify the penalties for continued non-compliance, and the enforcement timeline was left vague. Critics of the process noted that this was characteristic of the cycle: a period of documented non-compliance, followed by official acknowledgement, followed by compliance notices, followed by negotiations, followed by either partial remediation or effective administrative abandonment of the enforcement action. The result, across years of this cycle repeating, was that the nominal existence of corridor requirements had not produced actual public access to resort beaches in any consistent or reliable way.

The St Mary Communities

In St Mary parish, fishing communities along the coast between Oracabessa and Port Maria had been raising concerns about access for several years. The issue there was not resort corridor compliance in the formal sense — most of the properties were not large enough to trigger the corridor requirement — but rather the accumulation of smaller enclosures, fencing, and development that had progressively narrowed and in some cases eliminated the informal paths that fishing communities had used for generations to reach the water. The fishers were not seeking access to hotel beaches; they were seeking access to the sea to work. The distinction mattered in terms of which regulation applied and which agency had jurisdiction, but in practical terms, the effect was the same: access that had existed was gone.

Investment Climate Arguments

The tourism ministry’s position in 2014 — that aggressive enforcement of access corridor requirements risked damaging investor confidence at a time when hotel investment was finally returning — reflected a genuine tension that had shaped Jamaica’s approach to coastal governance throughout the post-2008 period. The argument had economic logic: Jamaica needed hotel investment, hotel investors were sensitive to regulatory risk, and the perception that existing approvals might be subject to aggressive compliance enforcement was a deterrent. The counterargument, made by access advocates, was that this reasoning had been used to excuse non-enforcement for so long that it had become a permanent veto on any meaningful enforcement, and that the corridor requirement would never have practical effect if investors could count on the investment-climate argument to insulate them from compliance obligations.

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