Special Budget for Port Vila Plan

One of the main tasks of the manager of town planning in the Port Vila Municipal Council, Jerry Sampson, is to complete a plan for the city and have it recorded in the government gazette.

A senior physical planner with the Department of Local Authorities, Sampson was transferred to the PVMC to assist the council with its planning needs. Once in place, the plan will assist the PVMC manage development in the city.

To ensure a final draft of the Zoning Document and Control Development Plan for Port Vila is completed by the end of 2015, the PVMC has added a special budget for next year.

A draft is already in place and the zoning committee working on the plan wants the public at large in Port Vila to know about it because it will affect the whole population and even the people of Efate must also have a say in the plan, Sampson says.

PVMC declared Port Vila a Physical Planning Area on 15 February 1988 and since then to now the Vanuatu capitol has no plan in place.

“Normally after declaration, there should be plan. But there is nothing to now, 2014, and development taking place in Port Vila to now have been carried out on an adhoc basis only. This means that we cannot define residential areas because the residential areas we have now are not legally recognized,” Samspon says.

“The Port Vila CBD (central business district) is also not legally recognized, because only certain things can be sold in a CDB commercial area such as watches, jewelry, clothes, trousers, but no grocery stores and supermarkets.”

The plan is an important document because anybody can sue anybody in regards to development activities taking place in the city and even the public can sue the council, says Jerry Sampson.