ST JAMES, Jamaica – Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett has revealed that the design for the $1 billion project to upgrade the ‘Hip Strip’, located along Jimmy Cliff Boulevard in Montego Bay, St James, has been completed.

The project is to be financed by the Tourism Enhancement Fund.

The scope of the work for the project includes widening of sidewalks, rerouting utility cables underground, creating thematic facades and other renovations to further boost the aesthetic appeal of the city.

“The designs and so on for the hip strip for example, they are done. We are going to start the work. We have to bury those cables that are now hanging precariously ahead of everybody and to bury them underneath and then we need to do street scaping and to spruce up the area,” Bartlett said.

He was speaking to reporters during a tour of Montego Bay with stakeholders recently.

“This second leg of the islandwide tour is to look at products in this immediate post Covid recovery,” the tourism minister stated.

The first leg of the tour was undertaken in the tourism resort town of Negril

– Horace Hines