PARLIAMENT’S Infrastructure and Physical Development Committee is today expected to receive a status update on the controversial $1-billion Junction main road rehabilitation project in St Mary, which started in 2017, and has now gone more than four years beyond its completion date.

The Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation says the progress of civil works on the Agualta Vale to Broadgate road section — or package one of the project — is 96 per cent complete.

Contractor Surrey Paving and Aggregate Company was granted additional time for completion, which would have given the company up to the end of last month to finish the work.

This was the second time the contractor failed to meet the scheduled completion target, the ministry noted.

“The contractor’s rate of production is also unacceptably low,” the ministry’s report to the committee stated.

The National Works Agency (NWA) had promised that failure by Surrey Paving to significantly increase the rate of production would result in immediate steps being taken to close out the project, and that the outstanding works would be awarded to another contractor using the balance of funds under the contract.

A timeline has not yet been determined for implementation of section two of the project — Broadgate to Tom’s River Road.

The parliamentary committee is also expected to hear concerns from a cluster of citizens’ groups, led by the Golden Triangle Citizens’ Association, along with arguments from the NWA, and the public defender’s office about overbuilding in the Charlemont Drive area of Kingston 6.

In recent years Charlemont Drive has seen sustained multiple-storey developments, which have disrupted the single-family arrangements that characterised the neighbourhood for decades, and upended the privacy to which residents have become accustomed.

The citizens’ associations have noted that while the 2017 National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) Provisional Development Order had changed the previously allowable 30 habitable rooms per acre and two storeys in height to 100 habitable rooms per acre and six storeys in height, the reality on the ground is very different.

“Before the ink had even dried on the provisional development order, NEPA has allowed for residential building heights of up to eight and 10 storeys in these areas, and many developers are allowed to get away with flagrantly increasing the allowable densities by falsely submitting one-bedroom units as studio units, and two-bedroom units as one-bedroom units, thereby approximately doubling the allowable densities,” the associations will argue in their written submission to committee.

The groups are calling for a moratorium on further approval of high-rise, high-density projects located in the heart of established low-density neighbourhoods, and for urgent consultations with the citizens’ groups and communities which are affected.

In October last year, Councillor Duane Smith (Jamaica Labour Party, Chancery Hall Division) called attention to the overbuilding of multi-family developments in sections of upper St Andrew, calling the situation “an absolute disgrace” and pointing to implications for sewerage and water supply.