Two sto­ries from San Fer­nan­do should raise con­cern about the need for a deep­er in­sti­tu­tion­al com­mit­ment to long-term in­fra­struc­ture plan­ning in Trinidad and To­ba­go's pub­lic sec­tor. The San Fer­nan­do Busi­ness As­so­ci­a­tion re­cent­ly reg­is­tered its ob­jec­tion to Hous­ing Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal's plan to take over the en­tire Chancery Lane Com­plex as an ex­pan­sion to the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal. The orig­i­nal strat­e­gy in­clud­ed a long over­due ex­pan­sion and mod­erni­sa­tion of the San Fer­nan­do li­brary which dra­mat­i­cal­ly lags be­hind the im­prove­ments done on the Cen­tral Li­brary in Port-of-Spain and even some of the re­vamped fa­cil­i­ties in oth­er parts of the is­land.

It's a re­al chal­lenge to have to choose be­tween com­pet­ing needs like ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion and ac­cess to med­ical care, but even the busi­ness as­so­ci­a­tion's pres­i­dent, Daphne Bartlett, would agree that the long stand­ing woes at the city's gen­er­al hos­pi­tal de­mand im­me­di­ate and sub­stan­tial im­prove­ment. Con­cerns have al­so been raised about the work in progress at the tem­po­rary Mara­bel­la mar­ket, sched­uled for com­ple­tion in Au­gust. Ac­cord­ing to An­tho­ny Sinanan, coun­cil­lor for Les Ef­forts West/La Ro­maine, the project is 75 per cent com­plete, but there's a short­fall of $5 mil­lion need­ed to com­plete the project. The tem­po­rary mar­ket was the re­sult of a strat­e­gy by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment to scrap ex­ist­ing plans for the Mara­bel­la mar­ket when they came in­to of­fice and the planned $45 mil­lion fa­cil­i­ty was dis­missed as over-bud­get­ed and the de­ci­sion was tak­en to es­tab­lish tem­po­rary mar­ket fa­cil­i­ties. One of the plat­forms that the gov­ern­ment came to pow­er on was the mis­man­age­ment and lack of fi­nan­cial con­trols as­so­ci­at­ed with the de­vel­op­ment projects un­der­tak­en by the PNM gov­ern­ment dur­ing its last two terms of of­fice.

At the root of those de­ba­cles was the de­ci­sion to by­pass long es­tab­lished civ­il ser­vice pro­to­cols through the es­tab­lish­ment of qua­si-Gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies de­signed to fast­track the projects en­vi­sioned by for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning. With­out ques­tion, that de­ci­sion led to some re­mark­able con­struc­tion achieve­ments, but at a high cost. Many of those struc­tures came in­to ex­is­tence bur­dened with cost over­runs be­cause of ac­cel­er­at­ed con­struc­tion sched­ules and poor over­sight. The list of those projects, all high pro­file ex­am­ples of cost over­runs in the hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars, is daunt­ing. Among them are the Ch­agua­nas Cor­po­ra­tion Ad­min­is­tra­tive Com­plex, Le­gal Af­fairs Tow­ers, the In­ter­na­tion­al Wa­ter­front com­plex, Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion Tow­ers, the To­ba­go Hos­pi­tal, both NA­PA struc­tures, Bev­er­ly Hills, the Bri­an Lara Sta­di­um at Tarou­ba, the On­col­o­gy Cen­tre at Mt Hope, Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus and the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre at the Prime Min­is­ter's res­i­dence.

Col­lec­tive­ly, these cost over­runs run in­to bil­lions of dol­lars worth of tax­pay­er mon­ey and more than a decade worth of de­lay. Even more dis­turbing­ly, sev­er­al of these struc­tures, in­clud­ing NA­PA, San Fer­nan­do the Tarou­ba project and the new hos­pi­tal in To­ba­go re­main frus­trat­ing­ly in­com­plete. Com­pound­ing these cat­a­stro­phes of prop­er in­fra­struc­tur­al plan­ning are the ad­di­tion­al costs paid by cit­i­zens who con­tin­ue to have no ac­cess, for years be­yond sched­uled com­ple­tion dates, to re­sources they have al­ready paid for. There is prob­a­bly no way to prop­er­ly quan­ti­fy the agony and loss­es that the peo­ple of To­ba­go have suf­fered be­cause of the fail­ure to com­plete the new hos­pi­tal long ac­knowl­edged as des­per­ate­ly need­ed there be­yond the mon­ey that's been poured in­to the project there.

Ad­di­tion­al costs arise when there is no im­ple­men­ta­tion plan for in­fra­struc­ture projects when they are com­plet­ed. One need on­ly ref­er­ence the mad scram­ble to fig­ure out what to do with NA­PA Port-of-Spain when it was ac­tu­al­ly com­plet­ed, and the politi­cians were done parad­ing the project or the sig­nif­i­cant sums be­ing spent on rent for gov­ern­ment of­fices while hun­dreds of rooms sit idle or in­com­plete in gov­ern­ment built and owned build­ings in the heart of the cap­i­tal city. It's clear­ly bet­ter to spend six months ad­di­tion­al time in more thor­ough plan­ning process­es which es­tab­lish re­al­is­tic con­struc­tion and ful­fill­ment time­lines and ac­count­abil­i­ties than to con­tin­ue to waste in haste. Prop­er pro­cure­ment prac­tices and project man­age­ment, thor­ough ad­min­is­tra­tive and main­te­nance strate­gies, and en­forced ac­count­abil­i­ties will be crit­i­cal to en­sur­ing that Trinidad and To­ba­go gets val­ue for mon­ey spent.