I shall try to an­swer some of the ques­tions posed by Mr S Mo­hammed in a let­ter to the ed­i­tor on the state of the La­dy Young Road by re­lat­ing my ex­pe­ri­ences since I first asked the same ques­tions. The San Juan/Barataria Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion is re­spon­si­ble, sole­ly.I have al­ways seen the La­dy Young Road as hav­ing the po­ten­tial for be­ing the world's most beau­ti­ful en­trance to a cap­i­tal city.

With this in mind I wrote to min­is­ter Hazel Man­ning in 2006, two years be­fore we staged the two in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­ences which brought world lead­ers to PoS, and spelt out how this should be done.

As the road is the on­ly artery out of PoS when down­town floods, it should be giv­en high­way sta­tus, with all that im­plies: no vend­ing or dump­ing, no road­ways in­ter­sect­ing and heav­i­ly mon­i­tored by the po­lice; a land­scape ar­chi­tect to be hired and plans drawn to drama­tise this beau­ti­ful site; what should be plant­ed, lay-bys iden­ti­fied, verges kept low and the spec­tac­u­lar view en­hanced. I heard from a mu­tu­al ac­quain­tance that she thought this a won­der­ful idea. And that was it.

Re­cent­ly, be­cause of my con­tin­u­ing in­ter­est, I was in­vit­ed to join a group of San Juan/Barataria coun­cil­lors on a fact-find­ing tour.This was to es­tab­lish how many squat­ters were on gov­ern­ment land, as the rep­re­sen­ta­tive for St Ann's had been re­ceiv­ing many com­plaints about these and oth­er in­frac­tions. The land north of the road is state lands, and south be­longs large­ly to the Catholic church and pri­vate own­ers.

I met the group at their of­fice and af­ter a con­sid­er­able wait we ap­proached a bus.Be­fore we board­ed the bus, how­ev­er, we were ad­dressed by a coun­cil­lor who stat­ed, "My name is (name called) and no­body will ever say I put them in the road. If I see a house and it not trou­bling me, I leave it just so. No­body will say I make them home­less."

There was no dis­cus­sion about re-set­tle­ment or pub­lic hous­ing. With that we drove off, soon to be met by a po­lice pa­trol car should any dis­tur­bance take place. We stopped twice, coun­cil­lors got out, walked around two dwellings and then back to the of­fice. So when I read that the Min­is­ter of Plan­ning said that the law gov­erned every­one, I thought of this coun­cil­lor ap­prov­ing law­less­ness. No hope!

The oth­er gov­ern­ment agency guilty of non-per­for­mance on the La­dy Young is Town and Coun­try whose job it is to mon­i­tor bill­boards. Their ad­ver­tis­ing act to­tal­ly for­bids bill­boards to be to be erect­ed on scenic routes. These eye­sores should be re­moved at once.We have the chance to cre­ate a space of out­stand­ing beau­ty. I sug­gest a La­dy Young Road com­mit­tee be formed, a strate­gic plan be cre­at­ed and we will move from there. Will the au­thor­i­ties in­volved please re-think their ap­proach.

Chris­tine Mil­lar,

Port-of-Spain.