Kevon Felmine

Works and In­fra­struc­ture Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er kept his promise to protest­ing Point Fortin res­i­dents on Thurs­day night as he of­fi­cial­ly com­mis­sioned the start of road re­pair in the area. This comes a mere six days af­ter he met with an­gry pro­test­ers who staged two days of fiery demon­stra­tion de­mand­ing the South­ern Main Road to Point Fortin be up­grad­ed. Warn­er had promised that re­pair work would be­gin two weeks from then. He al­so threat­ened to of­fer his res­ig­na­tion if fund­ing for the project was not made avail­able. On Thurs­day, Warn­er of­fi­cial­ly launched road­works at Ota­heite, La Brea and Point Fortin. At a for­mal cer­e­mo­ny at Cen­tral Round-About in Point Fortin, Warn­er an­nounced that works would be done at nights and would cost $21mil­lion dol­lars.

The break­down in­cludes $15 mil­lion to be spent on re-sheet­ing the road sur­face and the con­struc­tion of box drains from the Guapo Po­lice Sta­tion to Frisco Junc­tion, Point Fortin. La Brea and Ota­heite will re­ceive $3 mil­lion for the project. This, he said, was just the first phase in the re­pairs and that oth­er ar­eas will be re­paired when funds are al­lo­cat­ed in the next fis­cal pack­age. Warn­er told Point Fortin May­or Clyde Paul that the works would as­sist in tem­porar­i­ly al­le­vi­at­ing the un­em­ploy­ment sit­u­a­tion in the area. Warn­er said: "I'm say­ing to you that the drains, we shall fix them and we shall cre­ate em­ploy­ment. Hope­ful­ly all of us can bring Point Fortin to its pres­tige po­si­tion to what it had been in a time gone by. "I give you the as­sur­ance to­day that Point Fortin, La Brea, Fyz­abad this area as a whole, that we shall en­sure the ne­glect that these ar­eas suf­fered in the past, they won't suf­fer again.

Warn­er al­so called on lo­cal com­pa­nies in the area such as At­lantic and Petrotrin to as­sist in road re­pairs as part of their cor­po­rate so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. Main­te­nance of the road­way is key to cost cut­ting, he said, as he ap­pealed to Paul to have the roads prop­er­ly main­tained af­ter works are com­plet­ed. MP for the area Paula Gopee-Scoon in­sist­ed that the protest was not po­lit­i­cal but that it was to serve a pur­pose for the peo­ple. She told Warn­er: "The fact that you got the mon­ey so quick­ly, it re­al­ly means that some peo­ple don't want to see you go at all. "I look for­ward to the con­trac­tors in Point Fortin be­ing em­ployed even if on­ly un­der a sub con­trac­tu­al ba­sis and of course all the oth­er em­ploy­ees and labour­ers com­ing from Point Fortin."

Project man­ag­er Hay­den Phillip said sev­er­al new strate­gies were be­ing im­ple­ment­ed in the re­pairs. He said that in Ota­heite where there have been re­ports of many ve­hi­cle ac­ci­dents, a new type of mix will be used to in­crease trac­tion on the road. How­ev­er, he warned that the curves were not de­signed for peo­ple dri­ving over 100 mph. Sec­re­tary of the Point Fortin Taxi Dri­vers As­so­ci­a­tion, An­tho­ny Clarke, said he was sur­prised at how fast ac­tion was tak­en to start re­pair. He com­mend­ed Warn­er for the speedy ac­tion. Both MP for La Brea and Fyz­abad Fitzger­ald Jef­frey and Chan­dresh Shar­ma re­spec­tive­ly said it was the fastest they saw any min­is­ter ever come to re­pair roads in their con­stituen­cy.