EDITORIAL - Expensive roads and free advice to Mr Vaz

We have several times made the point in these columns that what is worse than formulating bad policy is the actual implementation of that policy.

It is a concept that we commend to Jamaica's information minister, Mr Daryl Vaz, and more broadly to the administration of Prime Minister Bruce Golding.

At his regular briefing of journalists on Wednesday about developments from Monday's weekly meeting of the Cabinet, Mr Vaz fretted and wheezed about questions being asked about the J$244,000-a-foot road being built in Christiana, which has drawn the attention of the contractor general, Mr Greg Christie, and is scheduled to be toured next Thursday by the finance minister, Mr Audley Shaw, and the minister with responsibility for transport and works, Mr Mike Henry.

Mr Vaz somehow, it seems, believes that the public's concern about how its money is being spent in this circumstance is unwarranted, and that anyone who asks about this project is unfair and unbalanced.

This bit of road is supposed to be a kilometre, or a bit over half a mile, in length and was originally announced to cost around $430 million. Last week, at a hearing of Parliament's Public Administration and Appropriations Committee, Mr Patrick Wong, CEO of the National Works Agency (NWA), the Government's construction arm, disclosed that the cost was really $800 million.

Mr Wong, at the time, didn't say that the price tag didn't include the acquisition cost of the land. That bit of information dribbled out this week, although the land price was not yet decided. The NWA has also admitted to making mistakes in calculating the expected rate of return on the road. The project, in Mr Shaw's North East Manchester parliamentary constituency, doesn't only seem expensive, but the process messy.

Mr Vaz's peeve is that the press is now focusing on this road, rather than others on which there have been overruns, including the Mount Rosser bypass leg of the Highway 2000 project which, according to Mr Vaz, will cost 150 per cent more than projected.

That 25 kilometres of four-lane highway cutting through mountains was initially announced to cost US$99 million, although Mr Vaz claims it was US$65 million. The new cost, according to Mr Vaz, is US$160 million - an overrun of 62 per cent on the US$99-million price tag.

The larger picture

We, however, won't quibble over the math, for there is a larger picture.

The Mount Rosser bypass was begun by the former administration on the eve of the 2007 general election, pushed forward as a vote-catching exercise. Indeed, the award of the construction contract to the French company, Bouygues Travaux Publics, was a matter of some political controversy. From that perspective alone, you would expect that this would be a project to come under scrutiny when the Government changed within two months and with little work done.

By early 2008, it was clear there were, as Mr Henry put it, geotechnical difficulties with the road, which the minister blamed on engineering shortcomings.

In fact, in March of that year, with the bill expected to rise by US$23 million, Mr Henry reported that the project was being assessed so he could "guide the Cabinet and the prime minister on the options".

The Government decided to push ahead with the project and to spend the additional sums.

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