Isn't it amazing how quickly things can happen when people put their minds to it?

The increasingly hilariously named Millennium Town Park and the Esplanade Square development on the Waterfront are for news journalists, as some enterprising young chap wrote 18 months ago, ‘the gift that just keeps on giving’.

And so you couldn’t help but feel that an old friend had come calling last week when St Helier Constable Simon Crowcroft made a proposition to force work to start on a park with no development or housing this year, and Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf said that there had been ‘significant interest’ in the finance centre and that he wanted the issue sorted by the autumn.

To say that the town park story is embarrassing for the Council of Ministers is an understatement big enough to block out the sun. Four-and-a-half years into the new, shiny, efficient system of ministerial government, there is still no park – despite a 2006 commitment in the Strategic Plan to build it ‘within three to four years’.

They can do new taxes, property sell-offs and Waterfront plans until your eyes bleed, but they can’t do the town park.

To say that it is embarrassing for the rest of the States Members is also an understatement of epic proportion. It was first mooted before 1997, it has been an election issue in four general elections and more hours have been spent talking about it than you could imagine.

But States Members can do debates about when Liberation Day is, whether the Constables should be in the States and the Plémont headland until your ears start bleeding too, but they can’t do the town park.

And so people are still parking their cars where the park should be. And that’s not the fault of the Council of Ministers alone, although they have to take most of the heat.

Even those who have been campaigning for the project have to accept that what they’ve mostly been doing is talking about it, not getting the job done, and if you pay someone £44,000 a year to do a job, then you’re entitled to results, not excuses.

The strange truth is that the Millennium Town Park has a greater, wider and deeper mandate than any politician in recent decades, if not ever. That’s not airy fairy talk or wishful thinking, or worse still some imagined insight into what the public want (a pastime best left for those in politics). It’s just a fact.

In 1997 a total of 16,404 Islanders signed a petition to have the park built. The record number of votes in a Senatorial election is 16,392 (for Vernon Tomes in 1993). Not even the most popular politicians of the last 20 years, Senatorial poll-toppers Tomes, Stuart Syvret, Philip Ozouf or Ian Le Marquand, could claim that the public want them in office more than they want the Millennium Town Park.

Those numbers partly explain why the issue won’t die. They also explain why alternatives (despite some interesting back-room chatter about turning the old Jersey College for Girls and Ann Court sites into parks instead) aren’t going to work. Islanders want a new park in town, they want it on the Gas Place and Talman sites, and they want it around ten years ago.

Last year when the States approved (thanks to Senator Alan Maclean’s ring-binder) Deputy Geoff Southern’s Business Plan amendment to put £10 million into the Millennium Town Park budget for 2010, it was fairly clear what they meant. They didn’t mean: ‘Put some money into an account labelled Town Park and then forget about it.’ They meant: ‘Take this money and spend it on the park this year.’

Deputy Southern’s amendment didn’t say anything about another Masterplan, or more flannel about delay. It said: ‘Get on with it.’

And it was a States decision with exactly as much weight and importance as the one that set up GST, and agreed the Island Plan, and put the Council of Ministers in their jobs in the first place. So how come there’s a difference?

Talking of places where people park cars, the Esplanade Square development throws up an interesting contrast. Despite being a perfect embodiment of what our American cousins were thinking about when they coined the word ‘boondoggle’, it is back in the news.

Senator Ozouf’s comments that financial institutions were showing ‘serious interest’ in investing in new high-quality office space is good news, as is his comment that the latest business survey showed that Jersey’s finance industry is growing. What is slightly less good news is that it has thrown open the whole issue of the Esplanade Square development again.

Senator Ozouf, quite sensibly and realistically, says that the post-credit crunch version may not be at the same pace and scale as the original version.

But the relevant bit is the line: ‘We want to see resolution of this certainly before the autumn’ – a hint towards the fact that the States retain a veto over any development on the site.

Think about that for a second. The Millennium Town Park has been hanging around since before 1997, with ministerial commitments missed and budgeted funds left unspent. And in mid-April, there’s a suggestion that ministers want a revised Waterfront plan sorted out by autumn.

Isn’t it amazing how quickly things can happen when people put their minds to it?