Cemetery Road contractor faces axe next month

Last Updated on Friday, 29 December 2023, 19:06 by Denis Chabrol

The contractor that is rehabilitating Cemetery Road, Georgetown could be fired next month if he does not complete the more than one-year long works on that north-south thoroughfare, Public Works Minister Juan Edghill said Friday.

“The contractor has received a revised deadline of January 2024 to complete this road and I could say here that if January end comes and this project is not completed, the contractor will be removed from the project,” he told a year-end news conference.

Options available to government, he said, include hiring another contractor or the Public Works Ministry’s Special Projects Unit to complete the works. “The Cemetery Road is too much of an important road for us to have this. It is not one of our proud moments of 2023 at all,” he added.

He had earlier this year said the GY$475 million project that was awarded to Avinash Construction and Metal Works Company in 2022 would have been completed by July, 2023.

But on Friday, he admitted that the reconstruction and improvement of Cemetery Road was a blot on the Public Works Ministry’s otherwise very good record of project implementation. “The project is significantly behind time. This is a concern to us,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Public Works Minister said lot 1 of the Conversation Tree road project was proceeding satisfactorily but there were “delays” on lot 2, prompting government to issue a revised deadline to the contractor or face removal. “These are two important thoroughfares that we can’t allow to languish like this,” he added.