By: Precious Mills
BASSETERRE, St.Kitts (Saturday 7th April 2018) – Representatives of five local contractors have affixed their signatures to documents for their official involvement in phase one of an island wide road project on St.Kitts.
Yesterday afternoon (Friday 6th April), an official contract signing ceremony for the Special Capital Road Projects, organised by the Public Works Department was held at the Airport Roundabout.
The businesses that have been contracted to participate in the project are: Allie Construction, Boonies Construction, B&B Ltd., Huggins and Son Construction and O’Loughlin Construction.
Chief Engineer at the Public Works Department George Gilbert informed that the name of the project is the Rehabilitation of the island main road.
“We have decided to break up the work in components so that the small and local contractors can be given an opportunity to participate in this venture. As such, there was the tendering process where at least three contracting firms were invited to bid on these components of work. Where the work was proposed, the bidders were invited from that community.”
He added: “The signing today is the first phase of the construction project where the heaviest traffic count is observed.”
Pointing to a map, he shared: “The work will commence from the Airport Roundabout… and will go this way to Keys then we will have another set of work that will be going on for the Camps Roundabout right down to Challengers to Bloody Point area…”
Gilbert said after the first phase the rehabilitation work will continue around the island.
Managing Director of ADeB Consultants Limited (of Jamaica) Martell Lee provided an overview of the project.
“We were engaged to look at what we would consider for in for St.Kitts a massive undertaking. The (Public Works) Minister through the Public Works requested and commissioned us to do a condition survey of the road which is approximately 47 to 48 kilometers of road and to provide him with reports and recommendations as to how this can be undertaken within 18 months, a massive task in my view and we have achieved that initial report, condition survey which will look at the road surface condition, drainage, the entire infrastructure, the alignment of the road, the widening of the road and areas where you would have safety issues-all that has been compiled in our report.”
Lee talked about challenges of reducing projects to small contractors and also offered some advice.
“Reducing projects to small contractor has its challenges and one of the major issues you’ll have with that is that if you are not careful, the over heads on the preliminaries can increase vastly to the proportion of the project so we have to set up the structure of the project so that we keep those preliminaries at a limit of 10 to 15 per cent and overall it wouldn’t be a burden to the project.”
He added: “The other thing that we wanted to make sure is that we have capacity building among contractors. So you need to involve small contractors whether they are a crew of ten men or twenty or less and therefore you will ensure that they build up their expertise over time and then you have the larger contractors that will always take care of themselves, they are capable and they have the expertise, they have the finances….and in the process you have to balance what you want to achieve.”
According to the Public Works minister Ian ‘Patches’ Liburd, the upcoming project is all about traffic safety.
“This road project is all about traffic safety as well. That’s why in some areas they are widening the roads. That’s why in some areas you will find drainage. Most areas will have pedestrian access so people will have sidewalks on which to move around and of course overall it will improve the safety on the roads here in St. Kitts,” he commented.