As it relates to the refurbishing of streets, Mayor Bradley said that the Council is almost through with the number of streets they had selected for repair and they have also added on a few more to the list.
DARRELL BRADLEY
“At present we are at 86 streets; there are 86 streets that the City Council has concreted in the year and a half in office and we have set a target of one hundred and so, we only have fourteen more streets to go by the ending of this year; we are right on track, we are working closely with the water, electricity and telecommunications companies; I have a meeting very shortly with BWSL to work with them in terms of strategizing, in terms of the works we are finishing off in the downtown area; the only street in the north side of downtown that we haven’t done is Douglas Jones Street and that’s being worked on by BWS crew; Cran Street was not in the original plan because that wasn’t in the loop that we were looking at and the loop we were looking at was Orange Street, Barrack Road, Craig Street, Hydes Lane, North Front Street but the first part of Cran Street has already started; I did an inspection there this morning and cement is already there and they are going to do Cran Street right up to Love FM and then we are already working on securing the funding for Cleghorn Street because we realized that when Freetown Road was closed down due to repairs then Cleghorn Street became a well trafficked street and it was damaged and because of these recent rains and it is a very nice residential area and a lot of people traffic that area but when we make adjustments like that we have to include that in our work program with the water company and the other utility companies so that street is likely going to take some time. The priority street in that area to finish the loop of major streets is Douglas Jones and BWS will very shortly come off that we will have a contractor go in there and when that is finished then that entire area would have been completed.
We are in Dean, South and Bishop Streets and when those are finished the only other streets that would be left in the south side downtown area would be East and West Canal. Let me also make a point here that the manholes in all the streets will be left intact; they will be reinforced but they would be left intact. We had some criticisms that there were wooden manholes on New Road and they had problems when vehicles drove on them but one of the things I want to emphasize is that nowhere on the streets do we use wooden manholes. The only reason that was put there because it is temporary; you can look at all the streets that the city has done and you would see no manhole. 95% of the work on New Road has been finished; there is still some cleaning work left and to put in iron manholes and those will be done very shortly then we will sign off on the street and it would be fully completed.”
