LEVEL BOTTOM, Trelawny – WHEN the Troy Bridge is finally repaired the ribbon cutting will be on its Trelawny side and it’s unlikely that Member of Parliament for Manchester North Western Mikael Phillips will be invited.

Clearly still miffed about Phillips’s reported quip, on the political trail, that Prime Minister Andrew Holness would not be welcome at a ceremony to reopen the bridge, minister with responsibility for works Everald Warmington continues his verbal assault.

“I spoke in Parliament last week about the Troy Bridge. I said the Troy Bridge in Trelawny. The Troy Bridge in Trelawny! So, when the prime minister comes to cut the ribbon it will be in Trelawny, on Trelawny side,” Warmington underscored.

He was speaking during last week’s ground-breaking ceremony for the multimillion-dollar road rehabilitation project between Jackson Town and Ulster Spring in the southern part of Trelawny.

The 125-year-old Troy Bridge, which once connected almost 2,000 residents between Manchester North Western and Trelawny Southern, collapsed on August 18, 2021. Residents have engineered several innovative but risky methods to get across the chasm that now separates the two parishes.

In late September of 2022 Holness announced that the Government was moving to fast-track a replacement, but the pace of green-lighting the project has elicited frequent criticism. The clamour tends to get particularly loud when it is time for students to return to school after a break.

Speaking ahead of Warmington last week, Trelawny Southern Member of Parliament Marisa Dalrymple-Philibert said both Holness and Warmington have kept her in the loop about what is being done to move the project along.

She told her constituents she had seen the drawings for the work to be done and she is looking forward to the prime minister officially declaring the replacement bridge open for use.

“I don’t talk in certain places because anybody can say anything… I know they have done all within their power to move this process on as quickly as possible so I don’t listen to what other people say,” declared Dalrymple-Philibert, who is also Speaker of the House and a member of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party.

As Warmington outlined during his contribution to the 2023/24 Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives on May 31, the Government is putting in place a programme to construct, replace, or repair 32 bridges — at a cost of $4 billion — over the next two years. The Troy Bridge is among eight of the 10 bridges for which the National Works Agency (NWA) has completed design parameters in order for them to be replaced this financial year. An allocation of $1.2 billion has been made for bridge repairs, $165 million of which will be spent on the Troy Bridge.

Also in Trelawny, work will be done on the Jackson Town to Ulster Spring road repair project. According to Warmington, the first phase will be from Jackson Town to Sawyers and will cost $205 million. The second phase of the project has an estimated price tag of nearly $225 million.

“The prime minister gave me this responsibility to ensure that infrastructure in this country is made better than we found it in 2016. Like the Troy Bridge — it was there for years, nobody saw it, nobody moved to do anything about it — it took us as a Government under this Administration to initiate the process of having it done and that is what we are doing now,” the minister said of the road works.