Ministry dealing with issues

What he did not say, however was that in each case, the contractor involved has already been instructed to remove and replace the areas of defective work, and that in several of the cases that he referred to, the remedial work has already been done, and the defects have already been corrected. A case in point is a defective strip of paving on the Churchill Roosevelt Highway in the El Socorro area which was removed and replaced by the contractor at his own expense. This also occurred recently on the San Fernando Bypass, where another section of defective paving work was removed and replaced at the contractor’s expense, and this practice is being applied wherever it is found that the work is not up to standard.

I do not know who Mr Nariul is, but he appears to have some knowledge of the Ministry’s operations. Regrettably, however, he left out the most important part of the story, which is the fact that the Ministry is dealing with the issues as they arise, and taking action under its contracts with the various road-paving contractors to ensure compliance with the required standards. I also suspect that Mr Nariul is familiar with the practice of retention in road paving work whereby a percentage of the contract sum is withheld from contractors until all corrective work is done, and I wish to assure him that the Ministry’s engineers are operating in a professional manner and are enforcing the Ministry’s rights and remedies under these contracts.

COLM IMBERT

Minister of Works