Meade defends hurricane cash delay

Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) Dr Rocky Meade has offered an explanation for why the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) spent only two per cent of the $1.44 billion in cash donations received to assist victims of Hurricane Melissa more than six months after the Category 5 storm devastated the western belt of the country.

The auditor general had also highlighted in her compliance audit report that $138 million and US$101,974 in Hurricane Melissa cash donations remained unspent when the report was tabled in Parliament in May.

However, Meade’s explanation, which comes several months after the report was tabled, appears to differ from an earlier response ODPEM gave to the Auditor General’s Department in April 2026.

Meade and ODPEM officials appeared before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) yesterday to answer questions on the Hurricane Melissa Compliance Audit.

Meade told PAC members that ODPEM had received donations in both cash and kind, and a decision was made to prioritise the distribution of physical items.

“The decision that was taken, in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane while persons were in need of physical items – giving them money would not help them at that time necessarily – they were interested in getting physical items. The items that were donated in kind were given priority, some of them were even perishable,” he said.

Continuing, Meade said ODPEM then focused on “giving them more ability to spend and we had to work with the businesses in the location to make sure that they were open; because if people got money and there were no businesses open, they couldn’t spend it.”

However, in April, ODPEM told the auditor general that the low utilisation of cash donations was due to the absence of authorisation from the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service to spend the funds.

Turning to the restoration of housing structures, Meade said that where roofing materials and other building supplies had been donated, priority was given to using those resources to support the Jamaica Defence Force and other volunteers repairing roofs that could be salvaged.

“The funds that we had, the idea was to reserve those funds to acquire and provide for these [modular housing] units that would give people the recovery ... ,” he added.

He said it was part of the Government’s plan to use most of the cash donations to support medium-term, sustainable recovery efforts, including housing solutions.

Committee Chairman Julian Robinson argued that the prioritisation of donated items was not in dispute. He noted that by the time of the audit in May – about seven months after the hurricane – ODPEM should have been focused on medium-term recovery initiatives, having already addressed the most immediate needs. Yet, at that point, only two per cent of the cash donations had been spent.

According to Robinson, it was “probably” the first time the public was hearing an explanation that the funds had been designated for a specific purpose.

The PAC chairman noted that when members of the public go beyond the call of duty to make donations and, more than seven months later, have not heard how those funds will be used to assist victims, they may be discouraged from contributing in future disaster-response efforts.

Meade told Robinson that communication had taken place at both the agency and ministry levels. However, he acknowledged that “if persons did not hear, we didn’t do enough”.

Additionally, Meade said the issue had been flagged sometime in February and not when the report was tabled in May.

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