Portmore’s councillors want control of the land earmarked for Jamaica’s proposed 15th parish, and the development fees that come with it, before the stalled law that creates the parish takes effect.
Portmore’s municipal council is asking the central government to hand it immediate administrative responsibility for the land that would make up Jamaica’s 15th parish, warning that it could otherwise inherit the cost of servicing new housing and commercial schemes without ever collecting the fees those schemes generate. The resolution, reported by the Gleaner, was tabled by the Deputy Mayor of Portmore at the council’s general meeting on Wednesday and backed by the Mayor and fellow councillors. It is addressed to the Minister of Local Government and Community Development, and it touches a question that matters well beyond Portmore: who pays for the roads, drains and public spaces that new neighbourhoods depend on.
A parish in waiting
The Counties and Parishes (Amendment) Act, 2025 was passed by both Houses of Parliament last year and provides for Portmore to become a parish in its own right. It would be the first new parish since 1867, when Jamaica’s 22 parishes were reduced to 14. The Act has not yet come into force. The People’s National Party challenged it in court, and in March 2025 the Chief Justice declined to grant the opposition an injunction while accepting the government’s position that the law would take effect only once the procedure set out in section 67 of the Constitution had been completed. According to the Gleaner, the conditions attached to the government’s undertaking include the Electoral Commission of Jamaica establishing the new electoral boundaries, a role the opposition had argued the commission must play.
The opposition’s objections went further than procedure. When the bill passed the House in February 2025, the party argued, as the Jamaica Observer reported at the time, that the change would end Portmore’s directly elected mayoralty and that the municipality still lacked services other parishes take for granted, including a functioning court, a general hospital and a market, leaving residents reliant on St Catherine.
In the meantime, the St Catherine Municipal Corporation holds administrative authority over the area in question. The Deputy Mayor said he regarded parish status as a matter of time, citing the electoral commission’s continuing work, and said he expected the Act to take effect after the next general election.
Following the fees
The council’s case rests less on identity than on arithmetic. The Deputy Mayor pointed to a growing number of residential and commercial developments within the proposed boundaries, and the initial fees attached to those projects currently go to St Catherine. Once Portmore becomes responsible for the area, it would take on the long-running obligations that follow: roads, public spaces and the everyday municipal services that growing communities expect. “We would not have collected any of the initial fees associated with the new developments,” the Deputy Mayor said, according to the Gleaner. The resolution therefore asks for responsibility to be transferred now, so that Portmore can collect development-related fees and prepare to assume full municipal functions when parish status arrives.
It is not yet clear how the ministry will respond, or whether an interim transfer is legally or administratively possible before the Act is in force.
What it means for buyers and builders
For anyone building or buying in the area, the dispute is a reminder that the authority approving a scheme today may not be the one maintaining it tomorrow. Developers work to the requirements and timelines of a particular planning authority; a change of authority partway through a project can mean new contacts, new procedures and, potentially, new interpretations of what was agreed. Homebuyers moving into new schemes have a quieter but longer interest. Once a developer has finished and handed over, the condition of the roads, the drains and the street lighting depends on a local authority that has the means to look after them.
That is where the council’s argument has weight. For any municipality, the approval stage is where a development pays its way into the public system. After that, a new community becomes a cost that runs for decades. If the fees are banked by one authority and the obligations later fall on another, the gap has to be filled from somewhere, and residents are usually the ones who notice when it is not.
There is also a broader question. Portmore is a large and largely residential municipality, and, as the opposition’s objections in 2025 showed, the question of whether it has the institutions to match its size has never quite gone away. The parish debate is, in part, about whether the administrative map is being redrawn to fit the way Jamaicans actually live.
The road ahead
The immediate decision rests with the ministry, and the larger one with the electoral commission’s boundary work and the conditions accepted by the court. Whatever the outcome, the episode highlights a test that will apply to fast-growing communities across Jamaica: whether planning approval, fee collection and long-term maintenance sit in the same hands, or are at least clearly coordinated between them. For buyers in new developments around Portmore, the practical step is unchanged: check what the developer has committed to and which authority has approved the scheme. For policymakers, the episode suggests that a new parish will need more than a new name on the map. It will need a revenue base equal to the communities it is expected to serve.
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