Montego Bay: Obviously doubtful that the delay-plagued first leg of the North Coast Highway Project will meet its December 2001 deadline, Prime Minister P J Patterson has now issued instructions that it must be completed no later than March.

Already two years behind the original completion date, the project is only 67 per cent complete.

“One must make any predictions as to timetable with utmost caution, but I am advised that 90 percent will be completed by (this) December,” Patterson told journalists at a press briefing in Montego Bay on Tuesday. “That portion will be paved and overall completion cannot go beyond the end of this current financial year,” he insisted. “We have provided additional shifts and mechanical and human resources to section two and three, particularly in regards to the earthworks and rock excavations in section two.”

Last week, even as Transportation and Works Minister Peter Phillips broke ground for the Montego Bay to Ocho Rios second leg of the project, the opposition blasted his ministry for the shoddy implementation of the work on the Negril to Montego Bay leg.

Jamaica Labour Party spokesman on tourism and the environment, Ed Bartlett, maintained that the ministry’s approach had been plagued by incompetence and ineptitude. He also charged that the project, which began three years ago, “has accrued cost overruns and delays unprecedented in recent years”.

According to Bartlett, the first leg of the project had already exceeded its budget by US$70 million, while the bridges and a significant section of the work is yet to be completed.

“The Minister has been giving deadline after deadline for completion — none of which has been met to date,” Bartlett said. “Projections available to me from engineers and sources close to the project are that phase one cannot be completed before August 2002.”

This delay, he added, would “completely destroy the remaining hopes of the winter tourist season in Negril” and push the final completion cost of the first phase to US$100 million.