Councillors press for more road funding
Published:Wednesday | February 10, 2021 | 3:28 AMJudana Murphy/Gleaner Writer
There is bipartisan support among local government authorities in Kingston and St Andrew for the Holness administration to shore up funding for road construction and repair in municipal divisions.
Mayor of Kingston Delroy Williams said the municipality was badly in need of funding amid a coronavirus fallout that has wiped out as much as one-fifth of monthly revenues.
Williams estimate of 10-13 per cent of Corporate Area streets as being in “fairly good condition” was testament to the scale of dilapidation that characterised the road network.
“There is a general deterioration in the entire road network and this is primarily because of a lack of funding,” Williams said on Tuesday.
“If you are not repairing at the rate that is required, then you are going to have that deterioration.”
That evaluation might find corroboration from National Works Agency CEO E.G. Hunter, who said last November that it would take $1 trillion to properly upgrade Jamaica’s roads.
The mayor said that roads repaired by the KSAMC in the wake of devastating rainstorms in October and November 2020 have been “standing up”, with little sign of deterioration.
An assessment by city engineers of roads rehabilitated over the last two years indicated that the corridors largely remained undamaged, the mayor disclosed.
“We spend very little and I believe we get good quality for what we spend,” Williams said.
His remarks came during Tuesday’s monthly sitting of the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC), where they debated a resolution to provide $17.7 million through the Equalisation Fund for the rehabilitation of Norman Lane and Harvey Road in St Andrew.
The Equalisation Fund was created in 1997 and is financed by 10 per cent of the money collected islandwide from property taxes.
All municipal corporations are allocated a percentage of the fund to carry out critical infrastructural work in the divisions.
People’s National Party councillor for the Whitfield Town division, Eugene Kelly, who moved the resolution, lamented that money spent patching roads could be better used if proper analysis was conducted.
“I yearn for the day that all the entities involved in the building and construction of roads come together and for us to analyse why it is that we seem to have a problem with maintaining our roads,” Kelly said.
Kelly used the opportunity to call upon central government to allocate more resources for road repairs through the corporation. He hinted that municipal authorities were more efficient in maximising expenditure.
“These roads will be repaired properly for $17 million, and we know, Your Worship, if it was another national entity, they would be putting something for $80 million or $100 million,” Kelly said.
Councillor for the Denham Town division, Jermaine Hyatt, supported the resolution and urged councillors across Jamaica to lobby the Government to guard the Parochial Revenue Fund.