‘Inefficiency’ at road repair depots sparks MP’s ire

Member of Parliament for St Peter, Colin Jordan, has issued a strong call for improved efficiency and accountability in the country’s road maintenance operations, particularly at government depots responsible for infrastructure upkeep.

 

Jordan, who spoke during the continued debate on this year’s Estimates, said that while the Ministry of Transport and Works (MTW) has done a fair amount of work on various roads around the country in the last year, the performance and general work efficiency of some of the entity’s workers left a lot to be desired.

 

“Oftentimes when I speak, those who work in the depot, say I come into the Parliament and curse them. I do what is necessary, what is required, and I administer what is deserved. I pay taxes, my family pays taxes, all of us pay taxes…some of those dollars paid in taxes go to pay people at the Jerusalem Depot,” he said. “My question is, what is the ministry doing to ensure that my taxpayer’s dollars go to pay the salaries of persons at other depots as well because I heard the complaints across the country that those workers and their supervisors do the work they are supposed to do and they do it properly.

 

“I am not going to ask if the ministry is satisfied because it must be dissatisfied, I just want to know what is being done to ensure that depots in this country do what they are supposed to do to maintain the road infrastructure in this country.”

 

Jordan stressed that there were clear inefficiencies in the system at the island’s depots and cited a glaring example of a pothole near the Jerusalem Depot that took well over a year to be repaired.

 

He said: “We had about two years a large pothole [that] was about 400 metres away from the Jerusalem Depot that took about 400 days before it was addressed. I used to ask the workers there if they used to get to work by helicopter because they obviously were not driving on the road, but they would be at work. Not necessarily working, but they are at work. I believe, and the people of St Peter also believe that we need some very ordinary fixes to these issues. People who are employed need to work.”.

 

In response, Minister of Transport and Works Santia Bradshaw acknowledged the challenges within her ministry and admitted that inefficiencies had developed over the years due to outdated or missing operational procedures.

 

She said: “I am fair in acknowledging that there have been challenges over the years in relation to MTW, and what we have found is that a lot of the standard operating procedures that once got things done, do not now exist. Fortunately, the team acknowledges the shortcomings, and we have been working to reorganise the depots so that they can become a lot more efficient than they are.”