A $30 Million Council Chamber Sat Empty. St Elizabeth’s Councillors Met in a Baptist Church Instead

• St Elizabeth’s municipal corporation moved its meetings to a Black River church in April 2021
• Its air-conditioned meeting room cost about $30 million and was completed in 2015
• Partitions to make the chamber COVID-safe were ruled too expensive
• Councillors and journalists raised concerns about acoustics and security at the church

For weeks in 2021, the business of local government in St Elizabeth was done in a church. The St Elizabeth Municipal Corporation moved its monthly meetings and other large-group sessions to the Black River Independence Baptist Church at New Town in April, the Jamaica Observer’s Garfield Myers reported. It was meant to be a short-term way to keep people further apart during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The corporation had expected to go back to its own chamber by May. Instead, the May monthly meeting was held at the church too. Mayor and corporation chairman Derrick Sangster said: “I would imagine that we will be here until general restrictions have eased.”

The corporation’s own meeting room is not old or run down. It was completed in 2015, after years of delay, at a cost of about $30 million, the Observer reported. It replaced a wooden building more than 100 years old that is a National Heritage site. Plans to put partitions in the air-conditioned room so members could sit safely were dropped because of the price. “The cost of doing partitions [is too high],” Sangster said.

The church is not a perfect council chamber. Councillors and journalists raised concerns about echo and security, and Sangster remarked during the May meeting that “the acoustics are poor”.

The story shows something that parish councils and planners often miss: a large church is civic infrastructure. When a purpose-built $30 million room could not be adapted cheaply, a sanctuary with wide aisles and room to spread out became the parish’s meeting hall. For churches, that is a case for designing and keeping up buildings that can serve more than Sunday services, with good sound, secure entrances and flexible seating. Those features raise a property’s value to the whole community. For councils, it is a reminder that a costly public building can be left idle if nobody plans for how it might have to change.

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