MONTEGO BAY, St James — Returning resident Denise Wray Burns is questioning whether she made the right decision to make Greenwood, a community that borders St James and Trelawny, her home.

“Greenwood is just a mess!” she said during a recent meeting where she and her neighbours expressed frustration with poor road conditions, delays in ongoing repair work and blasted the company doing the work for its untidy approach.

The road is being repaired by China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) under the Shared Prosperity through Accelerated Improvement to our Road Network (SPARK) programme.

Wray Burns said she never anticipated having to navigate poor road conditions which are exacerbated by the movement of heavy equipment and material being stored near residents’ houses.

“It’s just a ghetto, up there is just a ghetto,” she said of an area of the neighbourhood where asphalt is being stored.

Equally distraught is Richard Searchwell, who said he and his wife Enid are currently building a home in the community after returning to Jamaica.

“All day and night, whenever, big heavy trucks are driving through, making noise, dusting up the place. We don’t understand how they are able to come in and do something like that. I thought this was a residential area and that kind of activity shouldn’t be taking place here,” he said.

He is particularly peeved about the frequent movement of large equipment that is being stored in a section of their community for use on outside projects.

“Every day, 13, 14, 15 heavy-duty vehicles, sometimes low boys [trailer trucks] with excavators and they’re mashing up the road!” he griped.

Greenwood main road is being rehabilitated after it was chosen as one of the projects for the constituency of St James East Central by Member of Parliament Edmund Bartlett.

However, residents say delays in project completion and other issues have left them with an almost unusable road to enter the community. The fallout has impacted enrolment at the community school, according to teacher Sheldon Gayle.

“The time frame in which they are doing this [causes] us to lose a lot of students coming because parents are saying they are not going to turn off the good road to come on the bad road in the community,” he lamented.

Residents are also concerned about the health implications.

“The dust is really bad, constant every day. In the mornings you clean and by the end of the day, you still see the place dusty again,” said Christopher Smith who operates a villa in Greenwood with his wife.

“It impacts the community members’ health because the dust is very serious. We have employees there who’ve had to go to the doctor and get time off because of the dust,” he explained.

His wife Christy said the bad roads are leaving a lasting but unwelcome impression on visitors.

“We deal with a lot of international guests, sometimes high-profile clients like celebrities come and stay at the villa. For them to come to Jamaica and enter a community like this, they’re thinking, ‘Oh wow, where are we?’ because the road is so bad. We have to take detours with the bus,” she said.

“It’s dangerous too. Say they want to go down to the supermarket, they have to watch the potholes,” she added.

The roadwork is fairly recent but residents pointed out that some of the problems being faced — for example, illegal dumping — are issues they have complained about for years.

“I have been living in this community for over 30 years and this is the worse I have seen it. I don’t think that we as citizens should sit down and take this anymore,” Donnette Hill declared.

“The dust, the trucks, it is unbearable, really disgraceful,” she said.

She called on Mayor of Montego Bay Richard Vernon, the National Works Agency, MP Bartlett, and councillor for the Rose Hall Division Anthony Murray to act.

“Somebody needs to address this, this cannot continue,” Hill insisted.

Asked for a response, Murray empathised with residents and assured that most of the issues raised are being worked on or will be addressed soon.

“They are legitimate concerns because it is affecting their comfort every day. [But] the issues are temporary,” he told the Sunday Observer.

The councillor explained that the primary point of concern is the roadwork, which would have already been completed had it not been for last October’s Hurricane Melissa.

“About 85 per cent of the road is completed but the challenge we are having now is that the section that is to be completed is the section that is mostly below sea level,” he said.

Efforts are underway to figure out how to drain rain water away from the roads within the community and into the sea.

“The delay is not with the work, it’s with the design to construct the appropriate drainage system to take the water out, that’s where the hold-up is with the programme. We want to make sure when the drainage system goes in, it’s not a another problem but a solution,” Murray explained.

Addressing the issue of CHEC storing equipment in the community, he said the issue has been reported to the St James Municipal Corporation which is now looking into the matter.

Villa owners and operators Christopher and Christy Smith say that their business is being hampered by bad roads in the community.

The section of Greenwood where China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) stores heavy-duty vehicles being used on the SPARK project.

An area of Greenwood that is being used as an illegal dump.