Gail Alexan­der

The in­de­pen­dent team that re­viewed the Debe to Mon De­sir stage of the San Fer­nan­do to Point Fortin High­way has con­clud­ed it should not pro­ceed un­less the var­i­ous is­sues that came up were ad­dressed, team leader Dr James Arm­strong says.

He is urg­ing all par­ties to work to­geth­er.Speak­ing about the team's tech­ni­cal re­port at a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Arm­strong said while the State was re­spon­si­ble for some de­fi­cien­cies, the High­way Re-route Move­ment's po­si­tion did not con­clu­sive­ly demon­strate the high­way should not be built.

Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Coun­cil (JCC) chair­man Afra Ray­mond, who host­ed the me­dia con­fer­ence, said the com­mit­tee re­port was ex­pect­ed to be pub­lished on the JCC's Web site last night.

Ray­mond said there was an arrange­ment for the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Nid­co) to "make a con­tri­bu­tion" to the re­port's cost and al­though Nid­co was not fund­ing the ex­er­cise, there was a mil­lion-dol­lar ceil­ing.

The JCC re­ceived Arm­strong's re­port on Feb­ru­ary 4. Arm­strong said he re­quest­ed an ex­ten­sion but did not re­ceive it.Say­ing there were no win­ners or losers in the re­view, Arm­strong urged all par­ties to take the "high road." He added: "There are sev­er­al out­stand­ing is­sues that have to be ad­dressed to de­ter­mine if one should pro­ceed with this seg­ment of the high­way and if so, and (with) what kind of im­pact. And you would need to ad­dress to mit­i­gate that im­pact.

"I would like to see Nid­co and the HRM and all par­ties work­ing to­geth­er to ad­dress these is­sues on how to pro­ceed."I hope it can be used to rec­on­cile a num­ber of po­si­tions and bring peo­ple to­geth­er. I re­al­ly hope this is a les­son for us all to bring op­pos­ing par­ties to­geth­er."

Arm­strong said sev­er­al de­fi­cien­cies, for which the State was re­spon­si­ble, were found, es­pe­cial­ly in the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact as­sess­ment/cer­tifi­cate of clear­ance process. He al­so not­ed a lim­it­ed so­cial im­pact as­sess­ment ap­proach.

The team found the eco­nom­ic cost-ben­e­fit analy­sis to be "quite de­fi­cient" al­so, he said, and those is­sues had to be con­sid­ered in fu­ture if such projects were be­ing done.There was al­so some de­fi­cien­cy in pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion and he added there should be an ap­proved pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion process.

Arm­strong said the Town and Coun­try Plan­ning Di­vi­sion gave on­ly out­line ap­proval and cer­tain re­quire­ments con­cern­ing the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty were not met.The over­all prob­lem was in the process, Arm­strong said. He said de­vel­op­ment had to be about peo­ple and there were things that could be worked out if peo­ple ap­proached things dif­fer­ent­ly.

The re­view was not on whether the high­way should be built, Arm­strong point­ed out, but on the im­pact of the Debe-Mon De­sir sec­tion on res­i­dents.He said the high­way idea had been around since 1984, be­fore the PP ad­min­is­tra­tion, and was the first time T&T had a project of that scale.

Arm­strong was crit­i­cal of sit­u­a­tions where peo­ple "took one-lin­ers" and used them to their own ad­van­tage and said he still sensed com­bat­ive ap­proach on the is­sue which would make the re­view in vain.

He said if peo­ple did not take the les­son of the ex­er­cise on board they would be "hard learn­ers." He dis­missed the per­cep­tion that the re­port fell short, say­ing the team could not say sim­ply if to build or not.

Arm­strong said the all-lo­cal re­view team was as­sist­ed by three re­gion­al ex­perts on the en­vi­ron­ment and so­cial im­pact as­sess­ment as­pects. The full text of the JCC re­port can be down­loaded at: http://guardian.co.tt/news/2013-02-18/down­load-high­way-re­view-com­mit­tee-tech­ni­cal-re­port