Ground will be broken on 15 March for Cayman’s new Youth Centre Facility in Fairbanks Road, with foundation work scheduled to finish in mid-June, anticipating a full opening in one year.

Responses are due at the Central Tenders Committee by noon tomorrow to the mid-January request by the Ministry of Community Affairs for contractors to build a foundation at the 30.5-acre site, covering 28,677 square feet.

The committee will recommend a contractor by the end of the month, and construction, according to Minster Mike Adam, will start “around 15 March”.

“We want to get the ball rolling and have been advised by the steering committee to get started rather than wait for Planning [Department]. We want to get the project started quickly, getting jobs for people and addressing the situation with our youth,” he said.

The new juvenile-rehabilitation centre, unveiled in April last year, comprises four areas including a secure remand unit and two low-medium residential units, dubbed “cottages”, each housing up to 12 “students”. The site offers additional space for another two cottages.

Based on a rehabilitation, treatment and education system employed in the US state of Missouri, boasting among the lowest re-offending rates in the country, the “Youth Centre Faclity” will house under-17 offenders both placed by the courts and also currently mixed with adult convicts in Northward’s overcrowded Eagle House. The population will also include residents at West Bay’s Bonaventure Boys Home.

Mr Adam said that by the mid-June completion of the foundation on the $8 million project, “we should have the contact for the verticals awarded,” and that tenders would be invited “towards the end of February”.

He said the finished facility was likely to open “by April 2013, although it looks like a May delivery”, coincidentally, he noted, “just in time for the elections”.

“This was not done on purpose,” Mr Adam quickly added. “We have been driving this, pushing for it, and had to get an early start,” to address continuing problems of housing and rehabilitating young offenders.

The 2009-approved constitution, granting a 42-month compliance period, requires detained juveniles be kept separately from adults, forcing the administration’ to act by November as a swelling Northward population has spilled into the designated – and lighter security — youth detention Eagle House.

In September, Mr Adam said, anticipating the 2013 opening, government launched a “Missouri method” pilot programme at West Bay’s Bonaventure Boy’s Home, finding “we needed some slight modifications to enable the greatest benefit”.

The home was modified to accommodate a group of young women from Fairbanks Prison and another trial group of 10 young men, some of whom, Mr Adam, said “were out of control”.

In the intervening months, however, he said, progress on the 24-hour-care scheme “looks very, very good. As many as three of the group have been returned to mainstream schooling. They manage their issues on the spot.

“Through the special education programme, they get their issues under control, and then can return to mainline education,” he said, numbering the staff-to-resident ratio between 2:1 and 3:1.

“We have delayed re-opening Bonaventure”, he said, after converting the entire home to accommodate the Missouri method and the several-dozen Fairbanks inmates, “waiting for the board of the Missouri programme, who will be here in early March to look at the results.

“It’s very clear to me, though, that this is going to work,” he said. “Hope is on the way.”