Gail Alexan­der

Land in Pe­tit Morne will be made avail­able to about 300 south­ern res­i­dents whose com­mu­ni­ty has to be re­lo­cat­ed to ac­co­mo­date the Pt Fortin high­way con­struc­tion, Works Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er said yes­ter­day. Warn­er in­di­cat­ed this in a state­ment to the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives fol­low­ing Wednes­day's meet­ing of the Prime Min­is­ter and an in­ter-min­is­te­r­i­al team on the $7.2 bil­lion project. Warn­er said Gov­ern­ment was on tar­get with the project, sched­uled to end in April 2015. Gov­ern­ment is con­tin­u­ing with the Gol­con­da to Debe phase while al­so start­ing an­oth­er from Pt Fortin to Mon De­sir.

Warn­er said this would al­low Gov­ern­ment ad­e­quate time and re­sources to ad­dress is­sues with the Debe to Mon De­sir seg­ment as Gov­ern­ment at­tempts to en­sure per­sons are prop­er­ly com­pen­sat­ed. He said that the Debe to Mon De­sir seg­ment of the high­way en­tailed re­lo­ca­tion of rough­ly 300 house­holds in or­der to ac­quire right of way for the pas­sage of the high­way. Since the high­way would be pass­ing through com­mu­ni­ties many in­sti­tu­tions would have to be re­lo­cat­ed, the Works Min­is­ter ex­plained. Warn­er said thou­sands of skilled and un­skilled work­ers would be in de­mand dur­ing var­i­ous phas­es of the project.

Al­so, Gov­ern­ment has in­sist­ed that 40 per cent of ma­te­ri­als used for the project come from lo­cal in­dus­try. Warn­er said Nid­co had en­gaged a geo-tech­ni­cal com­pa­ny to in­ves­ti­gate claims by Di­a­mond Vil­lage res­i­dents about work-re­lat­ed vi­bra­tions from the project af­fect­ing their homes. Field­work for this in­ves­ti­ga­tion be­gins on Jan­u­ary 31 and will take a week. The fi­nal re­port will ad­vise on nec­es­sary ac­tion on this. Dur­ing yes­ter­day's ses­sion al­so, PNM MP Colm Im­bert called for de­bate on the Trans­port Min­istry's in­vi­ta­tion for ex­pre­sions of in­ter­est for pro­vi­sion of a light trans­port sys­tem above the Bus route from Port-of-Spain to Ari­ma. Dead­line for this is Feb­ru­ary 23. Im­bert said the time­line was too short for de­tailed ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est for an in­fra­struc­ture project of this mag­ni­tude.