By Robert Andre Emmanuel
The Minister of Public Works and Housing yesterday presented a series of infrastructural development plans for 2025, including digital solutions, building improvements, and housing initiatives for Antigua and Barbuda.
In Parliament, Minister Maria Browne announced a digital fault-reporting application for April 2025, stating that “the app will feature a user-friendly interface where citizens can report infrastructure issues directly to our database at headquarters.
“This streamlined approach will allow for more efficient scheduling and faster response times to address road and infrastructure concerns,” Minister Browne said.
According to the minister, there has been a number of issues which have resulted in the poor maintenance of road infrastructure, including wastewater management systems, increased traffic on roads and concrete spillage on various main roads.
“Our community roads have become somewhat secondary roads … the amount of heavy-duty equipment that exists here in our nation now is far much more than what existed years ago and so you have a further deterioration of our roads owing to this heavy-duty equipment traversing these community roads,” she said.
She said that an issue observed this year by the Public Works Department was that of household wastewater spilling into the streets.
“What has been happening as of late, I’m not sure if [Central Board of Health officials] are seeing this but Public Works, we’re seeing wastewater coming from individuals’ homes being deposited right onto the road.
“Now, this is something that has been happening for ages, but we are using more. The demand is greater for water now, even in established communities and so this has caused some serious deterioration in our community roads over time.
“So here we have urban roads, roads that never existed that we have to construct, and then we have roads that are being terribly deteriorated by the emitting of wastewater from households… so we’re going to be working with the Central Board of Health to see how that can be executed in terms of having that [remedied] and thereby eliminating the amount of excess water that goes onto our roads,” she said.
Climate change impacts have further complicated road maintenance efforts, according to the minister.
“We’re getting more rains now than we ever did before. The infrastructure that was built back in the day cannot accommodate what is happening today and so the work at the Ministry of Works is quadrupled,” she said.
Speaking on some solutions, there will be an implementation of zone inspectors with the digital reporting system.
“We have now gotten approval from the Cabinet to have infrastructure zone inspectors … There will be five or six zones,” Minister Browne explained.
She added that these inspectors will monitor “bridges, curbs and drains, potholes, urban roads that need to be constructed.”
The minister also announced the acquisition of new equipment “going into 2025. In fact, at the end of this month… some more will come going into 2025 January. By 2025 February, all of our equipment should be here. We’re looking at graders, rollers, spreaders, tower machines, excavators.”
Speaking about the state of government buildings, the minister announced plans to have a maintenance strategy including enhanced protocols across all departments.
“We’ve put together a programme for maintenance of public buildings. We are implementing more site visits to assess buildings and establish maintenance schedules for each facility,” Browne explained.
Meanwhile, she announced that, through collaboration with the University of the West Indies, “National Housing has secured a special epoxy treatment that provides a 15 to 20-year guarantee against leaks on concrete roofs”, which will be applied to Parliament, the High Court, and the Archives and is expected to arrive on island by the end of the year.
