REHABILITATION work will begin on 5.5 kilometres of roadway along the Negril to Negril Lighthouse Road by next month and according to the National Works Agency, the project is not expected to take long.

“Given the nature of the area, it is a business district and we don’t want to be there for a protracted period,” said the NWA’s public relations officer for western Jamaica, Stephen Shaw.

The Agency recently signed the $30-million contract with Surrey Paving and both sides will soon meet to hash out the work schedule and completion date.

“We will have to sit down and work out something with the contractors but it should not take a considerable amount of time because the road is fairly short,” explained Shaw.

According to him, the project will cover drainage work, overlaying the roadway with either asphalt or double surface dressing, the removal of rocks and the lifting of manholes where necessary.

“We have some critical drainage points but we know exactly what needs to be done and we have plans to get in there and get out as soon as possible,” Shaw said. “We would have handed over to the contractor before, but we were waiting to get information from the North Coast Waste Water Management regarding the sewerage laterals which are supposed to go down in the area. We did not want to fix the road and then have it dug up again.”

He added that initial reports had indicated that less than 10 per cent of the businesses in Negril’s West End area had not yet connected to the resort town’s sewage system and work would have to be done to get them hooked up.

But later discussions, he said, revealed that less than 10 business places needed to be connected.

“Those will be connected before we start the project, that’s the undertaking we got from the Waste Water Management team,” Shaw said. “And given that information, we proceeded to hand over the road and plan to get work started soon.”

Several other sections of roadway in western Jamaica are also being worked on under the National Road Improvement Programme. These include Marchmont to Seafort Town, Seafort Town to Dundee, Marchmont to Retrieve, Chester Castle to Jacks Gate and Lambs River to Struie.

“These are all at different stages of completion, between 10 perc ent and 98 per cent because they started at different times,” Shaw said.