Hopewell Transport Centre to house commercial shops

WESTERN BUREAU:

The Hanover Municipal Corporation (HMC) is looking to reconfigure the Hopewell Transportation Centre. In addition to its core function, some 25 shops are to be constructed to help drive commercial activity to the facility.

“There are some land spaces at the back of the transport centre and the Roads and Works Department went there under the instruction of the Commercial Services committee, to see how many spaces we can get to construct shops, to rent them to persons who are interested and are willing to occupy them,” Lucea Mayor Sheridan Samuels told The Gleaner.

With a motion tabled and adopted in Tuesday’s meeting of the HMC’s physical planning and environment committee, clearing the way for the reconfiguration of the transport centre, Samuels said implementation of the project will begin immediately.He anticipates that the buzz from commercial activities inside the centre will encourage public transport operators who are now reluctant, to begin using the facility. This it is hoped will generate more revenue for the HMC from both the rental of the shops and the fees charged to the transport operators.“We have been trying for many years to get that transport centre up and running. We have workers inside there that we have to be paying, and for some technical reason, the public transport operators in that area are not using it,”

The operators of public transport vehicles had refused to utilise the transport centre saying that their PPV licences do not stipulate that they should terminate there.

That position resulted in confrontation and court proceedings between the transport operators, who now terminate their trips in the Hopewell town square, and members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), who are involved in traffic management.

But Samuels says the change will be effected. “We are not here to make anyone’s life hard. We are here to ensure that you abide by the law and the terms that we have laid down. The transport centre is our property, and we need to earn some revenue from it,” said Samuels. “We will be willing to accommodate anyone who will abide by the regulations that are laid down.”

The Gleaner was told that the cost of implementing the proposal will be discussed in detail at the next meeting of the HMC’s finance committee.