Prime Minister Mia Mottley said Friday she is satisfied with the pace of road repairs under the Ministry of Transport’s Mill and Pave programme.
In just over a month, work has been completed on Salters Road to its junction with Highway Four in St George, she noted to journalists on an afternoon tour of the road works.
Mill and pave involves grinding up the road’s original asphalt into a tiny, gravel-like material. The milled material is recycled and then relaid as a smooth coat of asphalt.
“We are making progress and hoping that we can make more progress,” said the prime minister. “Part of the difficulty is that we have a limited number of road contractors on the island, and therefore the minister will tell you that she is constrained by that.
“We are aware that with all of the increased construction activity going on in Barbados, under the planned developments coming from the list that we have before the Planning and Development… Department – that we realised that there’s a significant amount of work coming. And therefore a number of entities have said that they will be investing in order to be able to allow the country to do more at a quicker rate, because there’s a large deficit and let’s be very clear, a lot had not been done under the last administration.”
She gave reporters a sequence of events stretching back to her first administration in 2018, beginning with debt restructuring followed by the coronavirus pandemic “that took up the best part of three years” and public spending, followed by propping up 52 000 out-of-work Barbadians through social security benefits.
Despite having allocated funds in the previous financial year, the PM acknowledged the impact of persistent rainfall, particularly along Highway One. These challenges have necessitated adjustments to the project timeline, prompting the need for extended working hours, including 12 and 14-hour days. She also sought to address public concerns, particularly in the north, noting a historical deficit in roadworks there. She outlined plans to extend infrastructure programmes to fix bridges which have not been maintained for decades.
Mottley told reporters: “The government has to balance out the roads, the mill and pave roads, the reconstructed roads, the ones that need utility mains going in again, the ones that need bridges reinforced and we are literally coming from way down but trying to be able to bridge that gap that has developed.
“From the list that they have from them, it is clear that as we move on from St George, we’re going into Christ Church and St Michael in particular, and many of the people on the south of the island are saying ‘We hear about the mill and pave but we ain’t seeing it yet’ . . . you see it right here, this [Salters St George]
was the first one started and there are some other major thoroughfares. We’ve made some adjustments.
“Lodge Road in Christ Church is a major thoroughfare going into Oistins that is in a bad state. We are going to take a look at that as part of an expanded programme because I believe that given where we are in the financial year now we can put an additional $5 million … as well so that they will be working with 35 million as opposed to 30 million.
“And then the road from Charles Rowe Bridge by Roberts Manufacturing going back to Chefette is also a very bad road. But the problem with both Charles Rowe Bridge and Lodge Road and Enterprise Road is that we need water mains I’m told and I’m having a meeting with the Water Authority about that. But with respect to Seaview Road which is the other really bad one that we want to get done, that can’t be mill-and-paved I am told, that has to be a full reconstruction because of how long it literally has been without attention, also because where it is going down [Wilcox] Hill.”
Mottley asked for patience from the public, suggesting the infrastructure overhaul is both vital and long overdue.
“[Some] roads are [in need of] reconstruction as opposed to straight mill and pave and therefore it means liaising with the Barbados Light and Power, the telephone company [FLOW and DIGICEL], the Barbados Water Authority and the natural gas mains. This is not a simple issue, and I asked Barbadians to bear with us. We knew from day one that we would have significant reconstruction to do with our infrastructure.”
She sought to link the infrastructure work to wider fiscal elbow room as her administration moved to reduce the debt: “Remember, for seven or eight years, money was not being spent on the infrastructure because we were spending 68 cents in each dollar in debt service.
“Our debt service has dropped significantly since we came into office because that’s what we prioritise and that has therefore given us the elbow room to start doing it. As I said we would have liked them starting from 2020 but the money went instead to fighting the pandemic and to keeping people alive in this country.”
(RG)
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