THE Government of Jamaica is advancing plans to establish a unified ‘One Road Authority’ to tackle decades of inefficiencies in road maintenance, planning, and accountability — an initiative long discussed but never executed, now pushed forward under the strain of infrastructure mismanagement exposed during the roll-out of the SPARK Programme.

Minister with responsibility for the Ministry of Works Robert Morgan, speaking at the St Catherine Chamber of Commerce and Industry meeting on April 30 at Cecil’s Restaurant in Spanish Town, confirmed that Cabinet has restarted the process of developing a centralised regulatory body to oversee all categories of roads — from highways to community lanes and farm access routes.

The move aims to close governance gaps that have left thousands of kilometres of roads in limbo, unclaimed by any government agency, and ignored during rehabilitation efforts ahead of the Shared Prosperity Through Accelerated Improvement to Our Road Network (SPARK) Programme.

“To do the SPARK programme, we had a challenge. We did not know how much roads were in Jamaica,” Morgan told local councillors and stakeholders. “There was no one place in Government that said to you, ‘We have this amount of roads,’ ” prompting the prime minister to commission a nationwide audit.

That study revealed that Jamaica has over 27,000 kilometres of roads, yet no single authority is responsible for managing them. Oversight is currently split among the National Works Agency (NWA), Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA), municipal corporations, and in some cases, no one at all — especially in newer housing schemes and private developments.

The lack of standardisation and enforcement has allowed housing developers to sidestep proper road construction, leaving homeowners in limbo and municipal corporations unwilling to take over sub-par roads.

“Some of the schemes that were built were not built to the standard so they would not qualify to be taken over by the parish council,” Morgan said in a follow-up interview with the Jamaica Observer. “Some of them didn’t have proper drainage. Some of the roads were not built properly.

“And then who suffers? It’s the residents who live in these developments… this is something that has to be addressed,” he continued.

The proposed One Road Authority is expected to set enforceable standards for all roads — whether built by the NWA, developers, or farm road programmes — and assign clear accountability for their maintenance. However, the minister acknowledged that significant stakeholder resistance remains, with agencies such as the NWA, RADA, and municipal corporations wary of losing control over their existing portfolios.

“We have not decided the fullness of it yet,” he told the Business Observer. “Persons from the [municipal corporations] have a legitimate concern that municipal roads are a big part of their portfolio… So we need to have a significant amount of consultation.”

Consultations with the World Bank and other international bodies are already under way to help shape the structure of the proposed entity which may borrow from best practices in other jurisdictions with national-level road management systems.

In parallel, Morgan revealed that the Government will need to spend approximately $20 billion annually over the next 15 years to bring the country’s road network up to standard. He pointed to years of underinvestment, driven not by policy neglect but by macroeconomic constraints.

“We have disinvested, or not invested, in our road infrastructure for many decades — not because we don’t want to but because… our economy did not give us the ability,” he said.

The announcement marks the strongest signal to date that the Government intends to formalise the decades-old vision for a national road authority, first mooted in 2008 but shelved amid political and institutional pushback.