AS the Government embarks on a comprehensive road rehabilitation for pothole-riddled thoroughfares across the island, portfolio Minister Robert Morgan is insisting that it is more than just patching, but in some instances involves a complete overhaul of roads that may be at the end of their life span.

He noted that with some roads, no matter how much they are patched, there is nothing that can be done to “rescue” them.

“If I have a road that is at end of life and a pothole emerges, let’s [say] Grant’s Pen Road — the section between Barbican Road and the Shortwood stoplight — it is at the end of life, meaning that the road needs to be either milled and paved or just ripped up totally,” he told reporters and editors at this week’s Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange.

“So if I patch the section right near the stoplight and one foot away from that section is a crack, and the next rain falls, that crack is going to become a pothole. So, while I would have patched the section that is there before, the fact that the road has reached its end of life, meaning that that patching is an extremely temporary measure to provide short-term relief,” he explained.

Morgan admitted, however, that there are times where contractors have not done what is required of them, which leads to further deterioration of the road. He noted, for example, that they are supposed to cut the pothole [square it] with specific equipment, not use a pickaxe.

“They are supposed to remove compromised material, replace that compromised material, compress it, use the right amount of asphalt so that it’s almost level to the previous road and ensure that there are no other flaws close to the patching. Sometimes that doesn’t happen for whatever reason,” he said.

He said that in seeking to improve the quality of the work, in many cases the sheeting method is used in which larger segments of roadway are repaired, but fewer repairs are covered than patching.

“Patching is important, yes, but sometimes you just have to [do] sheeting. The issue is, sheeting does not extend as far as patching. So you may expect us to patch from Shortwood stoplight all the way to Hope Road, but sheeting means I can only patch from Shortwood stoplight to let’s say MegaMart and that’s where the cost comes in. The better you do the job the higher the cost is going to be,” he said.

Lamenting that the cost per kilometre to properly rehabilitate a road is $35 million to $40 million, Morgan said the Government has not been spending that amount to repair roads “because we simply, based on the fiscal situation in the country, never had the fiscal space and the capital budget to spend $35 million to $40 million per kilometre to fix roads”.

“Think about what $35 million to $40 million gets you — proper drainage, replacement of defective water mains, proper soil testing, and proper asphalt testing; you have a new asphalt lab in Montego Bay and I think one is to be opened in Kingston [so] proper material testing is done at the quarries, and telecommunications ducts are put in the road before the road is paved. There is proper engineering supervision,” said Morgan.

This improved road work, he said, is what is to be achieved under the Government’s $40-billion Shared Prosperity through Accelerated Improvement in our Road Network (SPARK) programme where each of the four packages will have its own independent engineering entity, whose job is to hold the contractor accountable for what they’re doing.

“Those are the things that are required to build proper roads. We have never had a situation in Jamaica before where we have had the opportunity to talk properly on a national level, build roads to international specification, except when we’re doing, like the south coast highway improvement projects — Highway 2000, North-South Highway,” he said.

“We have not been able to fund our road rehabilitation properly for many decades. As the economy has turned and as the economy improves, and as we maintain proper fiscal fundamentals and fiscal management and you see the debt to GDP goes down, there’s more space within the budget. We are now at 74 per cent of GDP, we used to be at 140-odd per cent in 2012, which means that we now have more money to put in the capital budget, which is why we are able to do SPARK,” he said.

Morgan argued that there is no issue with material quality because the standards in the contracts and the bill of quantities (BQ) “are pretty much established”.

“We don’t have an issue with the type of aggregates that we’re getting, because the standards are…in the BQ — the size aggregate you are getting, the type of material you’re supposed to use and how you’re supposed to do it. Where the issue comes in is whether or not the resource is allocated for this particular work is sufficient to make the work stand up for a long period of time, and the other issue is whether or not the contractors who are on the road are following the BQ and are doing the work as they are supposed to do.”

“So every patching, every road work that the National Works Agency (NWA) contracts, has a bill of quantities where the NWA officer goes out, he looks at what is there, he does his measurements and would write a BQ that is approved by head office, and then that is what they give to the contractor to do the work,” he explained.