Whitter Village 10 Years Later

NAME OF FEATURE | THE GLEANER | FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2020 6 AS WITH all business ventures, Whitter Village has had its fair share of challenges and achievements. It’s been a long road to realising the long-held dream of creating a first-class shopping facility for the Ironshore-Rose Hall area. For starters, Angella Whitter, the chief executive officer of owners of the facility, the Whitter Group, and her late husband, well-known landowner, entrepreneur and real estate developer, Joseph Whitter, had a warm time securing financing to get the multimillion-dollar devel- opment off the ground. “We went through many hoops before we got the bank to agree. When he conceptualised the de- velopment and started looking for financing, my husband was up in age and he was the principal direc- tor with the assets. Because of his age, the banks were kind of reluc- tant to provide a loan although we had assets to back it up,”MrsWhitter recalls. Having cleared that hurdle and secured a loan from then RBTT Bank, now Sagicor, and starting to build out the dream, there came other obstacles that impeded construc- tion for almost one year. The local authorities – the St James Parish Council – gave approval for the con- struction but refused to grant per- mission for access to the highway that was being realigned and recon- structed at the time to fall smack in the middle of lands owned by the Whitters. Mrs Whitter recalls that it took intervention at the highest lev- els of government to prevail upon the then mayor of Montego Bay to change tune and grant the ingress and egress required for proper ac- cess to the shopping centre. “That held up the development for over seven months. One can only imagine what it meant for any development on a bank loan to be delayed for seven months. We couldn’t continue with the con- struction. How they were trying to change the dynamics of the egress and the ingress into the property was going to severely hamper the development and cause the traffic control problems that they said they were trying to avoid,” she recalls. With the issue of access re- solved with the help of then Prime Minister Bruce Golding, the major WHITTER VILLAGE 10TH ANNIVERSARY Montego Bay, St James: S TRESSING THE importance of having full access to education regardless of socio-economic and health challenges, theWhitter Group of Companies has now of- ficially launched the Joe and AngellaWhitter Foundation. Angella Whitter, chief executive officer of the group and wife of the late developer and visionary, said the intention is to cre- ate a $5-million fund to assist students from Montego Bay who have shown“the aptitude, ability and good grades”at tertiary institutions but are experiencing financial difficulties. The foundation, Whitter further noted, will also seek to assist, as best as possible, appli- cants with comorbidities from illnesses related to kidney, heart and optical diseases“to assist with medical expenses for surgery or other medical procedures as is deemed necessary by the foundation”. The latter, she added, is of particular impor- tance to the foundation, considering the fact that JoeWhitter suffered fromunderlying con- ditions and“elements of these health issues at different levels duringdifferent stages of his life”. “The scholarships will be awarded annu- ally during the month of September,”Whitter added. “They will be for students who live across western Jamaica and is our way of stressing the importance of having a quality education and the foundation’s unwavering desire to assist the less fortunate.” Whitter said that the students will be study- ing in the areas of entrepreneurship, business management, construction and buildingman- agement, and architecture and engineering. From these areas, she said the foundation will look at applications and stories sent in by students yearly and award from $50,000 to $300,000 to each applicant to enable them to continue on a path to success. Students in western Jamaica over the years have had difficulty sourcing scholarships and grants owing to limited options available to them. This past year, manywere forced to defer their education due to the COVID pandemic. TheWhitter Group of Companies owns and has successfully completed several property developments in Jamaica. The most iconic being the Whitter Village, a 220,000-square- foot retail and office complex situated in the Ironshore, Rose Hall area of St James. Other projects include the 18-shop Golden Triangle Mall and the former 18-hole championship Ironshore Golf and Country Club. Joe and Angella Whitter Foundation to provide scholarships for tertiary students out west WHITTER VILLAGE A success story amid many challenges PLEASE SEE SUCCESS , 8