Editorial | Get NRRA right

Having recommended the creation of a special purpose vehicle to guide the post-Hurricane Melissa rebuilding of western Jamaica, The Gleaner continues to support Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ decision to establish a National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NRRA) as a super agency to do the job.

However, we repeat our proposal of a governance structure for the NRRA that gives Parliament broad oversight of the authority, thereby not only widening its transparency but ensuring a role for the political opposition.

In that regard, notwithstanding the urgency in getting the NRRA up and running, the draft NRRA Act should be available for public review ahead of its passage by Parliament. In other words, unlike what too often happens, the Bill must not be brought to Parliament and rushed through all its stages in the same afternoon.

Further, in setting up the NRRA, the government should seriously review how similar organisations have worked in other jurisdictions, so as to benefit from their successes and avoid their pitfalls and failures.

New Zealand’s Canterbury Earthquake Authority Recovery Authority (CERA), established after the 2011 Canterbury Earthquake; and the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA), set up to coordinate Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, are agencies worthy of Jamaica’s attention.

Hurricane Melissa hit most of Jamaica as a Category 5 storm on October 28, causing at least 45 direct deaths. But its longer-term effect is in the more than 130,000 homes it either damaged or destroyed, as well as the vast range of public public infrastructure it partially or fully ruined.

The government and international agencies have estimated the cost of the physical damage of nearly US$9 billion, or over 40 per cent of Jamaica’s GDP. Full recovery – including building back with the resilience to withstand increasingly powerful storms, and moving whole communities that are given to flooding – will take several years.

As this newspaper has said, and the administration has agreed, the scale of reconstruction can’t be accomplished within the normal budgetary framework. Neither does the Jamaican state’s existing bureaucracy possess the institutional capacity to efficiently undertake a project of this size and complexity.

It is in this context that the proposed NRRA is a sensible idea – if it can deliver efficiently and effectively. And transparently.

Dr Holness has promised that the NRRA will be structured to do just that. It will be established by an Act of Parliament; given substantial authority to operate cohesively and to cut through red tape; and have oversight from a “multi-stakeholder board that (will ensure) we are making the right decisions, that there is transparency and accountability”. The agency will report directly to the prime minister.

The proposed model is neither unprecedented nor unusual. Indeed, many post-disaster special purpose recovery vehicles have been central government bodies, including New Zealand’s CERA, which was demobilised in 2016; and Japan’s ongoing Reconstruction Agency, established after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that severely damaged coastal areas of northwestern Japan.

But it’s not the only model. Indeed, Louisiana won praise for a governance board for its LRA that included Republican and Democratic state legislators as well as independent stakeholders. Jamaica’s low trust environment commends the Louisiana approach for the NRRA. Alternatively, while the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) will rightly have a coordinating role in ensuring the NRRA’s projects align with national priorities and that its work isn’t frustrated by bureaucrats, the agency’s governors and CEO should be made to periodically report to a special parliamentary oversight committee, such as the Integrity Commission is required to do. Except that in this case, there would be a specific reporting timetable, say each quarter, set out in law.

Further, there must be clarity in what the NRRA is expected to achieve, with a transparent timetable and a reporting mechanism (such as written reports and robust interrogation by the parliamentary oversight committee) that matches deliverables with outcomes.

Additionally, the authority must have from the outset appropriate skills and management systems, lest it falls short in its operational modes and deliverables.

Granted that New Zealand’s CERA, as a government department, didn’t have the operational flexibility and legal independence as is proposed for NRRA. But it wasn’t without agency.

However, CERA’s performance was rated as mixed. Its role became less clear the longer it existed and the scope of its engagement expanded.

Moreover, as New Zealand’s then auditor general, Lyn Provost, pointed out in a 2017 report, even as CERA spent more on communication “surveys of the community show that the public’s trust and confidence in information from CERA declined over time, and many in the community were not satisfied that they had enough opportunities to influence decision-making about the recovery”.

Part of the problem was how it started. Said the 2017 report: “[I]t took a long time for CERA to set up effective systems and controls, which meant that staff had to work in a challenging environment without the usual back-office support and controls that we expect in a public entity. CERA’s management controls and performance information needed improvement right up to the time of its disestablishment.”

The NRRA must avoid these snags and hiccups.