A row is re­port­ed­ly brew­ing be­tween the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment and the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) over the own­er­ship of the old Scar­bor­ough Re­gion­al Hos­pi­tal build­ing at Fort King George.

A state­ment yes­ter­day from the THA said To­ba­go De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Dr Del­mon Bak­er held a 90-minute meet­ing yes­ter­day with Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don dur­ing which he in­di­cat­ed that the build­ing had once be­longed to Cen­tral Ad­min­is­tra­tive Ser­vices To­ba­go (CAST), an arm of the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment, but it might now be in the hands of his min­istry.

"I sug­gest­ed to the min­is­ter that what he needs to do is if in fact there is a le­gal that he should com­mit with us that re­gard­less of whether there are le­gal is­sues or not that he, as the min­is­ter and the rep­re­sen­ta­tive, should com­mit to that build­ing un­der no cir­cum­stances com­ing out of the hands of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly," Lon­don was quot­ed in the state­ment as hav­ing said in an in­ter­view.

"I didn't get from him ex­act­ly what his po­si­tion is on that but I think he might have seen the view­point be­cause I don't think we want to go down that road to al­low these le­gal­i­ties to cre­ate un­nec­es­sary chal­lenges," Lon­don added.The build­ing was va­cat­ed by the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (TRHA) in De­cem­ber fol­low­ing the open­ing of the new Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal at Sig­nal Hill.