KINGSTON, Jamaica — The Bill to establish the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) that will drive the major reconstruction projects post-Hurricane Melissa was tabled in the House of Representatives on Thursday by Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness.

“I am pleased to inform this honourable House that the Bill to establish NaRRA under its own special purpose legislation is being tabled today,” said Holness.

He explained that NaRRA is not another bureaucracy, rather “it is a deliberate intervention in how Jamaica executes”.

“It will serve as a centre of technical excellence for project preparation and delivery — ensuring that the quality of our plans matches the scale of our ambitions,” Holness noted.

“It will function as a single point of national coordination, eliminating the fragmentation and delay that have too often slowed us down,” added the prime minister.

Holness explained that the NaRRA will operate as a platform for public-private partnership, structured to crowd-in private capital alongside public investment — so that the resources of the Government go further, and the burden on the taxpayer is lighter.

Said Holness, “NaRRA will have special powers to accelerate development approvals, as well as procurement, enabling the execution of resilient infrastructure projects at a scale and speed this country has never seen before.”

“NaRRA is not only about project delivery, it is about project networking to create new economies in areas impacted by the disaster and to induce the greatest expansion of our economy in the shortest period of time in our history,” he said.