Gov’t allocates $500 million

EIGHTEEN months after its pledge to reintroduce the “Length Man” road programme for unemployed Jamaicans, especially in rural areas, the Government is preparing to start a pilot.

Minister without portfolio in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation Everald Warmington assured the House of Representatives Wednesday that the programme is slated to come on stream in coming months for the maintenance of roadways across the island.

He said that with an initial budget of $500 million, the pilot for the programme will have four components: visual inspections, preventative maintenance, mapping of road assets, and environmental stewardship.

Some 62 corridors have already been identified as the pilot areas, such as Dunrobin Avenue in St Andrew, Twickenham Park Road in St Catherine, Washington

Boulevard, also in St Andrew, and the entire length of the Mandela Highway, which is a highly trafficked area.

The project was announced during Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s speech to the 2019 annual conference of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) at the National Arena, when he said that the programme would be introduced across Jamaica “to employ people who have not benefited from the Government’s prosperity programme”.

“We expect that the programme will employ a significant number of people right across rural Jamaica to ensure that they get a little piece of the prosperity,” he said, noting that “the progress to prosperity sometimes can seem unfair to people who have not seen or felt the benefits”.

Warmington, who was speaking in the annual sectoral debate on his roads portfolio, explained that the original concept of a Length Man is