After more than 50 years without piped water, the residents of Lower Buxton and Middle Buxton, two communities in St Ann, have grown accustomed to harvesting rainwater.
When rain nah fall is problems as the toilet can’t flush,” Paul Brown, a resident of Lower Buxton for the past 59 years, told the Jamaica Observer during a visit to the community last week.
“The bad roads slow up business; no taxi nuh come up here as you can hardly drive on the road,” Leonard Clarke, a resident for over 30 years, said.
Carl Wray, who has been living in Middle Buxton for the past 45 years, said the water problem is perpetual.
Majority of the houses here have tanks and are dependent on harvested water.
Every community leading to Brown’s Town have bad roads.
“When you pay taxes you don’t pay it to the MP, you pay it to the Government, and therefore it is an unrealistic expectation that the MP alone can come and initiate these projects without the Government making the allocations.
The difficulty I currently have is that I am not a member of the governing party and funds are operated in such a way that there is no equal access to what is present there, and it is almost impossible to get any infrastructural programmes done,” Dr Campbell said.
“The only funds I have access to, really and truly, over the last two-and-a-half years, would have been the Constituency Development Fund, which is $20 million, and as you would imagine that cannot do any major infrastructural programmes,” he said.
Regarding the road conditions, Dr Campbell said the same applies and made reference to the Jamaica Emergency Employment Programme, which was implemented by his political party when it last formed the Government and which provided funds that aided roadworks.