Prime Minister Andrew Holness says downtown Kingston, the capital's commercial heart, "looks worse" today than it did more than four decades ago and requires a massive plan of intervention covering sewage, roads, and “sick buildings”. Speaking at the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce 41st Annual Awards Banquet on Thursday night, Holness drew on a personal memory to make the point.He recalled attending his graduation ball at a downtown Kingston hotel after leaving St Catherine High School, when he said the area was safe enough that students slept on the grass and took the bus home in the morning."But it hasn't changed in over 40 years. In fact, it looks worse," said Holness, 53. Holness acknowledged that efforts were being made to clean up the downtown area but described them as insufficient relative to the scale of the problem."While I applaud the attempt, it is merely a patch. There is so much more to do for downtown Kingston," he said. "The infrastructure there is in need of significant intervention - from the sewage to the roads to the sick buildings. It needs a massive plan."The Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation recently launched a campaign to clean the streets and improve order and security in the city. Holness attributed the deterioration in part to what he described as "considerable disinvestment in the infrastructure of our capitals" over many years, and said the barrier to transformation was no longer just financial."It is not now only a matter of how it will be financed. The question is, do we have the administrative and organisational capability to do it with speed?" he said.Holness said the same challenge of bureaucratic capacity that confronted downtown Kingston's transformation was central to why the government created the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA). NaRRA is a state agency designed to move reconstruction spending at a pace and scale as the existing bureaucracy “simply could not take on the transformation that will be required in the recovery from Hurricane Melissa.” "The current bureaucracy has never spent six billion US dollars in any capital programme," he said. “Think about it.”Downtown Kingston is the capital’s main cultural and commercial district, located along the country's southeastern coastline, which includes the seventh-largest natural harbour in the world. It houses key financial institutions, major retail and wholesale outlets, as well as open-air markets, including the well-known Coronation Market, popularly called 'Curry'. The area is also home to some of the country’s most important government and administrative offices, among them Parliament, the Supreme Court, the Kingston Public Hospital, a major trauma centre in the region, and the Institute of Jamaica. Downtown also includes several inner-city communities, many characterised by ageing and in some cases dilapidated housing stock. Longstanding social and economic pressures in these communities have been linked in research and policy discussions to persistent crime and violence in parts of the urban centre.Follow The Gleaner on X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram @JamaicaGleaner and on Facebook @GleanerJamaica. Send us a message on WhatsApp at 1-876-499-0169 or email us at onlinefeedback@gleanerjm.com or editors@gleanerjm.com.