By RIEL MAJOR

Tribune Staff Reporter

rmajor@tribunemedia.net

WORKS Minister Desmond Bannister spoke on the sidelines of the presentation of keys for a fleet of new vehicles - valued at $1.6m - to various departments at the Ministry of Public Works, including the family islands.

The fleet represents the first tranche of a $3m allocation, according to Mr Bannister, who added the remaining $1.4m will be used to purchase more vehicles in July.

"For many years," he said, "you the staff had to make do with vehicles that are aged and continue to break down oftentimes barely functional. Wear and tear has taken its toll on the current fleet. Many of the cars are inoperable, others are in poor working conditions despite constant repairs and servicing and that has resulted in absorbent cost in the government.

"In fact when I was appointed minister every single department I visited without exception complained to me about their vehicular woes and the inadequacies of their fleets. I’ve heard many stories of officers having to catch rides with non employees in order to carry out their job functions."

The works minister highlighted the importance of providing timely interactions with the general public, stakeholders – one of the benefits of this acquisition.

Mr Bannister said: "First it will impact the country’s ease of doing business, ranking as it relates to conduct and the facilitation of inspections. Secondly it will provide greater access of transportation to facilitate the work of the ministry, particularly as it relates to our major involvement and relation to the summer school repair programme. Thirdly it is going to improve and enhance the Ministry of Public Works’ efficiency of the delivery of service to the general public and also enhance employee morale.

"The ministry of public works has been given a mandate to aggressively pursue the refurbishment of the national infrastructure. Every island you go to now you see something happening not just roads in New Providence. Cat island, Long Island, Andros, Grand Bahama, any island you name you will see something happening right now so it’s imperative that efficient and reliable modes of transportation and specialty vehicles for our staff available to them to execute their functions."

Fielding questions from reporters on Friday, Mr Bannister also defended the 12-day repaving exercise of Sir Milo Butler Highway.

The Works Minister said it was critical for his ministry to ensure the road safety for the driving public.

He said: "That highway has one of the highest traffic counts of any road in this country. If you go on that highway from 8am to about 10am you will see a constant line of traffic. When our engineers checked it they were concerned about a number of factors and so it was important for us to have it repaved and easier to repave that than many other roads in New Providence. Because we don’t have a lot of restrictions we have with pipes, etc, under the highway."

He noted before a road can be paved all of the utility companies in New Providence has to do whatever remedial work is needed.

"We have an exercise that goes on here every Monday where all the utilities companies come here and they go road by road through New Providence. Before we can do any paving Water and Sewerage has to go in, BPL, Cable all of them have to go in to do whatever remedial works they have. We don’t have such challenges with that highway so we were able to get that done fairly quickly and able to ensure the public that uses that highway has a safe driving experience," Mr Bannister said.

"Just for the record every road we pave, we have kickbacks. When we paved Seabreeze we had kickbacks, but look at it now. Everywhere we go we’re having challenges because people don’t understand the importance of us making sure the driving experience is safe."