Transport Minister Bobby Pickersgill yesterday appealed for patience from Portmore residents who have vowed to resist a toll for the use of a planned new six-lane bridge over the Kingston Harbour, being built as part of the Highway 2000 project.

Pickersgill, on the mandate of Prime Minister P J Patterson, met yesterday with Kingsley Thomas, the chairman of NROCC, the government agency that is facilitating Highway 2000, as well as its developers and operators, the French construction firm Bouygues, to discuss the concerns of the Portmore residents.

Afterwards, Pickersgill told the Observer the government was mindful of the nearly 200,000 people who live in the community across the harbour from Kingston, but said they should “just be patient”.

“If I were a citizen of Portmore, perhaps without knowing all the facts I would be (upset too),” Pickersgill said.

He, however, declined to disclose any decisions arrived at during the meeting, saying that he first had to report to Patterson.

It has been proposed that users will have to pay J$65 (approximately US$1.05) to use the six-lane bridge when it is completed in another 18 months or so, or use the longer land-side route, via the Mandela Highway, to get to and from Kingston.

The new bridge will replace the existing two-lane causeway, built in the 1960s when a few thousand people lived in Portmore. The causeway, with the heavy traffic it has sustained with the rapid growth of Portmore in the past decade-and-a-half, is believed to be nearing the end of its useful life.

But at a big citizens meeting last week, Portmore residents, led by vocal parson the Rev Barrington Soares, rejected the idea of having to pay the toll. Soares raised the idea of taking the matter to court.

They called the toll an inappropriate tax.

But Pickersgill suggested that the toll rate that has been suggested was not fixed and that it could well be adjusted.

“Recall that there is a toll regulator,” he said yesterday. “Recall that there is a process that had to be gone through. I think how that figure ($65) came into the public domain was from questions emanating in a meeting. Figures just keep coming up.”

Moreover, Pickersgill said, there would be time enough to fully address the issue.

“We’re talking about 12-18 months,” he said. “Time, as of now, is not the essence.”

In a separate, but related issue, Pickersgill also disclosed that squatters who were recently moved from the fishing village just beyond the causeway, to make way for the new road, would be relocated soon. He suggested that they will be accommodated near the Port Henderson strip.

The squatters were first moved by NROCC to lands owned by the Port Authority of Jamaica, but were soon told by Port officials that they could not stay.

The land was needed for the development of the Port of Kingston, the Port Authority said.