The To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) in­ten­si­fied its road re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion ex­er­cise for To­ba­go in the Bethel com­mu­ni­ty yes­ter­day. Just one month in of­fice, new­ly ap­point­ed Sec­re­tary of In­fra­struc­ture and Pub­lic Util­i­ties Hilton Sandy has promised that the as­sem­bly will con­tin­ue to de­vel­op the in­fra­struc­tur­al ca­pac­i­ty of the is­land, pay­ing im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion to main and branch roads. The ex­ec­u­tive coun­cil has ap­proved $76 mil­lion for main­te­nance and de­vel­op­ment works with prin­ci­pal con­trac­tors Seereer­am Broth­ers, Warn­er Con­struc­tion and Trinidad Con­trac­tors. Sandy told re­porters his di­vi­sion's en­gi­neers would be close­ly mon­i­tor­ing the stan­dard and progress of the road works be­ing done and con­trac­tors had been warned that if works were not sat­is­fac­to­ry, their ser­vices would be ter­mi­nat­ed.

He said the as­sem­bly's paving crew, which had been work­ing around Scar­bor­ough, would be do­ing some works in oth­er dis­tricts as well. Wind­ward To­ba­go will great­ly ben­e­fit from works to be car­ried out.

Sandy said the scope of road works by the de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme would in­clude not on­ly con­struc­tion of re­tain­ing walls but widen­ing of some ar­eas of main roads to ac­com­mo­date two ve­hi­cles. He al­so an­nounced at the post-ex­ec­u­tive coun­cil me­dia brief­ing on Wednes­day that oth­er works to be con­duct­ed in­clud­ed the in­stal­la­tion of a ma­jor un­der­ground sev­en-foot wide cul­vert at the De­laford Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre to pre­vent flood­ing. Work­ers in the De­vel­op­ment and Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief pro­grammes re­ceived some good news from Sandy who said the pro­gramme would not be closed for De­cem­ber, as was cus­tom­ary.

He said: "We in­tend to go straight ahead be­cause it's a prob­lem when we stop to mo­bilise to come back to jump start the work, so a de­ci­sion was tak­en and dis­cus­sions were be­ing held with the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil." Sandy al­so sent out an ap­peal to peo­ple who make en­trances on to the Claude Noel High­way to de­vel­op busi­ness­es. It was re­port­ed that in some cas­es peo­ple had de­stroyed ex­ist­ing road in­fra­struc­ture to do so. He told the pub­lic that en­trances made on to the high­way cre­at­ed prob­lems. "If you need an en­trance to your land come in and see the sec­re­tary or the ad­min­is­tra­tor and we will dis­cuss it and if it is not go­ing to be a prob­lem we will cre­ate the en­trance for you," Sandy said.