Ministers should come to Agriculture Road to evaluate the work

Dear Editor,

I wish to reply to a letter written by Mr Anthony A Haynes published in the Stabroek News on August 4 captioned, ‘There will be minimum maintenance for next two decades when work on Agriculture Road is finished’. It was a response to a previous letter of mine published in SN on July 21.

In Mr Haynes’s reply to me he answered some questions I had raised in my letter pertaining to the road contract and the cost of the road. He wrote the following: ‘’… the rehabilitation is being undertaken by the Ministry of Public Infrastructure under its Miscellaneous Roads Programme, 2017. The Contractor is K P Thomas and Sons Incorporated, the Project Engineer is Anthony A Haynes, the contract sum is $59,031,149 and the site extends a distance of approximately 1230m. Carriageway works include the upgrading of the road structure with mixed loam and/or crusher run and sealing using asphaltic concrete. The contract is scheduled to end in September of 2017.” He goes on to say that I purport to have excellent knowledge of road construction and would have been on the site with the current contractor for the duration of the contract, which commenced on July 6, 2017.

First, I live in Agriculture Road and I traverse this road more than 6 times a day. I am not so blind as not to notice the poor work which has been done. I am calling on Minister Patterson, Minister Joseph Harmon and the Minister of Agriculture to come into Agriculture Road to evaluate this work. The cost of $59,031,149 is more than ridiculous. What has been done from the beginning of Agriculture Road to Block CC which is claimed to be 1230 metres or approximately 0.75 miles, is to patch holes, throw in some crusher run and just roll over it. I would ask the

contractor what his labour costs for this job are, when he is scheduled to end the work in September of 2017. It seems that has already ended, since all his heavy duty road equipment has been removed and this work has been stopped for over a week now.

From the inception they did not work two weeks consecutively. My question is why did the work stop? I am calling on the administration to conduct an audit of the expenditures on this road. When this work commenced we were elated that we would get a road like the one constructed through Market Street, It’s unfortunate the quality of this road is already damaged by heavy duty vehicles coming in here, like 40 foot container trucks, sand trucks, huge trucks transporting hymacs to the back dam, etc, etc.

I would like to invite any media house to come and carry this road project on national television

Yours faithfully, Rev Gideon Cecil