Road contractors urged to be more professional

Roads Minister Jesmond Mugliett yesterday urged road contractors employed on the various projects currently being undertaken to take a more professional approach, especially to manning of project sites and quality control.

Minister Mugliett is responsible for the largest road network upgrade project that this country has ever seen. The road upgrade programme, funded under the Fifth Italo-Maltese financial protocol, will in fact see the complete reconstruction of 16 km of roads stretching from Luqa to Mosta and Zebbiegh via Qormi and Zebbug. The sheer scale of the project has brought never-seen-before challenges and a few problems since it started in June last year.

Not all the work under the Italian protocol had been awarded in the initial batch of contracts, he told The Sunday Times. "We anticipated problems," he said. "So we kept some of the funds for project overruns - and to have as an incentive to give remaining works to those who finished fastest.

"A third of the way down the line none of the three contractors who were awarded the work were advanced enough to take further work. And with one contractor there were even serious doubts that the works he had been allocated initially could be delivered by our September 2005 deadline.

"So we took half that contractor's work, and awarded it to someone else. We then negotiated with three other contractors who had originally bid for the work and awarded the remaining works to them after the price was brought into line with the third cheapest bid that was awarded in the initial contracts. That means we now have a total of six Italian contractors working on the project."

Mr Mugliett made it clear that the intermediate deadlines his ministry had set for the contractors along the way were not included in the contracts that had been awarded initially. "My intention was to ease congestion. What we were asking for was over and above the contract. We did not succeed.

"There were certain stretches of road that could have been opened, like the Mtarfa-Tal Qlejjgha road, but the roundabouts at each end, where there is a concentration of services like electricity and water mains, were not ready. The work cannot be totally planned before the onset. The contractors terminated certain stretches and we put pressure for them to be completed on time."

Once the work was in hand, Mr Mugliett said the ministry commissioned landscaping works, which did not form part of the original Italian protocol brief. "Last month, the Environmental Landscaping Consortium was given the work on landscaping in parallel with the work on the roads. Notwithstanding this change, in fact, just this week we opened two of these roads to traffic, and these are more or less in line with our intermediate deadlines.

"We want make contractors feel responsible, so that they will truly plan their work. We need a culture change. Contractors need to mobilise properly and have adequate manning levels when they undertake big projects such as this one."

To show that quality assurance is an important issue, a contractor was ordered to re-do a 600-metre stretch of road between Zebbug and Rabat. The work was completed early last week. "There will be no compromise on quality," he affirmed.

Addressing the issue of transportation systems in general, Mr Mugliett said that, ultimately, there was a finite capacity of how much local roads could cope with traffic.

Alternatives have to be found and Government was eying particularly the Greater Harbour Area, where 150,000 live within 22 local councils.

Apart from three major capital projects - Manoel Island-Tigné, the Cruise Passenger Terminal and the Cottonera Waterfront - there were a number of others that were also "in the pipeline": Dock 1, the Park and Ride project, Pace Grasso ground, and the Opera House, incorporating City Gate and Freedom Square.