Gomez Says Urban Renewal Could Have Tremendous Benefit:
By Candia Dames -
Nassau, Bahamas:

The Urban Renewal Programme could provide tremendous benefits to local communities if sufficient resources are put in it, according to Anglican Archbishop Drexel Gomez.

"You’re not going to change the quality of life in The Bahamas until you change communities," said Archbishop Gomez, who added, "It wasn’t perfect. We would be stupid to expect it to be perfect."

The archbishop made his comments when he appeared on the Love 97/JCN TV programme, "Jones and Company", this past Sunday.

He said he publicly supported the Urban Renewal Programme for two reasons.

"One, it was seeking to address real issues in the community. It was not a theoretical approach, but a practical approach to what was going on at ground level in the communities and we were beginning to see changes at that level," Archbishop Gomez said.

"Secondly, I supported it because it was something Bahamian. For the first time in our history we were looking at ourselves and seeking a Bahamian solution to a Bahamian problem and to me that spoke volumes."

The archbishop also stressed that the crime problem must take a community response.

"Until we as a community take on the task of reshaping our community, we won’t get very far," he said.

"I don’t wish to sound pessimistic, but you cannot treat it as something that’s isolated from the total life of the community."

The Urban Renewal Programme has been a hot button issue in recent times with the Progressive Liberal Party claiming that the new administration has dismantled it, and government ministers claiming that this is not the case.

In fact, when he spoke during the budget debate in the House of Assembly in June, Minister of State for Finance Zhivargo Laing said the Ingraham Administration has in fact allocated more money to the programme that what was allocated by the Christie Administration.

On Monday night, Opposition Leader Perry Christie, who addressed an outdoor meeting of the PLP’s Yamacraw branch in Elizabeth Estates, blasted the government over the programme.

" Since you are bastardizing Urban Renewal, since you are mongrelizing school policing – I am told today, you sent home all those persons who would have been employed as tourism [police] officers telling them bring your uniforms in, your time is finished as of tomorrow – I say to all Bahamians, this country was not a country created for Hubert Ingraham and the FNM; this is a country for Bahamians," Mr. Christie said.

"When the Progressive Liberal Party introduced Urban Renewal as a programme in this country we knew that our commitment was to introduce a programme that would have a long term commitment to empowering communities through the presence of police officers who would be one with the community to empower those communities to develop strategies to help in the fight against crime and to diminish the fear of crime.

"My God, Mr. Ingraham, the most innovative programme introduced in this country of a social nature is right in place before your eyes. If you don’t know it, read about it. Why are you trying to change something that was working just because the PLP introduced it?"

18 July 2007