Multimillion dollar Scotland District rehabilitation project to get underway soon

Prime Minister Mia Mottley says work will soon begin on the Chinese-funded multimillion-dollar road rehabilitation project in St Andrew.

She said personnel from China arrived here this week to finalise some matters in the Complant/Scotland District Road Rehabilitation project which will start in the near future.

“The management team has arrived in Barbados. They are having conversations now with the local contractors and the local design team. There is one issue remaining for the Ministry of Public Works to complete, which is waiting on the Special Tenders Committee for the appointment of the Barbados supervisory team of the project,” she said.

The Prime Minister gave that update during a virtual political meeting in St Andrew on Thursday, when she also said the last Democratic Labour Party (DLP) administration had abandoned the island’s rural districts, particularly those in the north and the east.

She charged that pleas from residents of rural constituencies, for assistance in housing, water security, and development, went unanswered by the former DLP administration, even as the land slippage crisis in the Scotland District and other areas accelerated.

“There was a study to show that the level of erosion and the level of slippage in the Scotland District was such that it threatened the property and lives and infrastructure of people living in the Scotland District…,” Mottley said.

“I hear people in the Democratic Labour Party having the temerity to open their mouths and talk about roads and bridges in the Scotland District when they abandoned it for the majority of the 10 years and allowed it to fall to ruin.”

The Prime Minister added that it was a failure by the DLP government at the time to recognize the seriousness of the still-growing climate crisis, that caused much of the deterioration in infrastructure that the BLP administration has had to fix.

“…A failure to recognise that the climate crisis means that we would not be in a position to have access to the water necessary for the trees and the plants to grow because we have a groundwater crisis,” she said.

“The bottom line is, we decided that no, this cannot be, and as a result, millions of dollars have been spent both at Bawdens and Haggatts in order to be able to put in large ponds of water, that we can now have serious agriculture production again in St Andrew because of the Barbados Labour Party government,” Prime Minister Mottley added. (SB)