As many as 500 people could soon be finding jobs with a major highway adoption project.
According to Minister of Transport and Works Michael Lashley, 50 companies, each employing ten people, would be involved in the Adopt A Kilometre project.
“You are looking at at least 500 persons to be employed in that project, and it is ready to go,” he told reporters during a tour of a road project in St Martin’s, St Philip, yesterday.
“[We are] just waiting now on the Town Planning Department to sign off.”
The companies will adopt and beautify sections of the highway running from Grantley Adams International Airport, Christ Church, to Mile-and-a-Quarter, St Peter.
“It is basically a beautification programme,” the minister explained.
“It will also give an opportunity to persons from the Drainage Unit and other persons who have lost jobs to be absorbed into a programme like that.”
Lashley said a soon-to-be-launched $50 million public and private sector road rehabilitation project would also boost employment this year. The project, involving major construction companies, is expected to be spread over two years.
“We have a whole set of roads that will be in that programme, financed by the construction companies themselves,” he said.
“A whole gamut” of small business people, including truckers as well as carpenters, masons and general workers, should find work in the programme, he told reporters.
Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler announced both projects on Monday, saying they promised “to not only cut Government’s expenditure on this process, but create jobs for persons who might be affected by the proposed retrenchments”.
He said they were just “a few of the major projects which we know will start in 2014, and together with other smaller ones will generate good levels of public and private investment to buttress our efforts to extract growth in our economy this year, even in spite of our strong fiscal adjustment programme”.
