A ma­jor mile­stone in the trou­bled Solomon Ho­choy High­way Ex­ten­sion Project will be reached to­day with the open­ing of seg­ments from Mon De­sir to La Brea and Vance Riv­er to the Dun­lop Round­about.

This is ex­pect­ed to re­duce the com­mute be­tween San Fer­nan­do and Point Fortin to 20 min­utes—a key de­vel­op­ment in long-promised im­prove­ments to this coun­try’s road net­work.

It is un­for­tu­nate, how­ev­er, that get­ting to this point in the up­grade of the coun­try’s ma­jor north-south high­way had to come at such a heavy cost to tax­pay­ers, not on­ly in terms of the bil­lions of dol­lars spent to date, but the nu­mer­ous de­lays and con­tro­ver­sies that have dogged the project.

In ad­di­tion to the po­lit­i­cal dra­mas be­tween the two gov­ern­ments that presided over dif­fer­ent stages of the high­way con­struc­tion, there have been nu­mer­ous de­lays, cost over­runs, law­suits, protests and even a hunger strike.

None of this has done jus­tice to the mem­o­ry of Sir Solomon Ho­choy, T&T’s first Gov­er­nor Gen­er­al, for whom the high­way was named.

Al­so, in terms of tak­ing cred­it for sig­nif­i­cant in­fra­struc­tur­al de­vel­op­ment, nei­ther the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM), nor the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship, should ex­pect ku­dos for a job well done from a na­tion that has en­dured bac­cha­nals of all kinds for the bet­ter part of the 13 years it has tak­en to get to this point.

This was a project that got un­der­way dur­ing the then Patrick Man­ning PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion with the promise of sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tions in trav­el time be­tween San Fer­nan­do and Point Fortin and an end to peren­ni­al flood­ing at Mos­qui­to Creek, among oth­er im­prove­ments.

Eas­i­er ac­cess to Point Fortin and its in­dus­tri­al ac­tiv­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the oil and gas sec­tor, had been a de­vel­op­ment ob­jec­tive for decades, along with brighter prospects for ma­jor towns on that south­ern route, in­clud­ing Debe, Pe­nal, Siparia and Fyz­abad.

How­ev­er, mis­man­age­ment has plagued every stage of the project. Brazil­ian firm Con­stru­to­ra OAS, SA was award­ed the TT$5.2 bil­lion con­tract in Ju­ly 2011. It was the sin­gle largest con­tract ever award­ed by T&T.

By ear­ly 2015, OAS Con­stru­to­ra was in tur­moil, filed a pe­ti­tion for ju­di­cial re­or­gan­i­sa­tion in Brazil seek­ing bank­rupt­cy pro­tec­tion and, with­in a year, had stopped all work on the high­way and left T&T.

In ad­di­tion to that set­back, which has re­sult­ed in years of ex­pen­sive lit­i­ga­tion be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and OAS, there were nu­mer­ous con­tro­ver­sies, in and out of court, when the High­way Reroute Move­ment led by Dr Wayne Kublals­ingh tried to block the Debe to Mon De­sir sec­tion of the high­way. This in­clud­ed Dr Kublals­ingh’s dra­mat­ic, well-pub­li­cised hunger strike out­side the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter in St Clair.

The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and oc­ca­sion­al bouts of in­clement weath­er, which al­so caused de­lays in the project’s progress, pale in com­par­i­son to these ma­jor events linked to the high­way con­struc­tion that dom­i­nat­ed na­tion­al at­ten­tion for weeks at a time.

Hope­ful­ly, with the fin­ish line fi­nal­ly in sight, the un­pleas­ant events in­volved in de­vel­op­ing a smooth, fast route from San Fer­nan­do to Point Fortin are now firm­ly in the rearview mir­ror, nev­er to be re­peat­ed.

From now on, the aim should be to com­plete the ma­jor road im­prove­ment projects cur­rent­ly in progress, in­clud­ing the much-need­ed ex­ten­sion of the Churchill-Roo­sevelt High­way to San­gre Grande, on time, with­in cost and with­out con­tro­ver­sies.