Ryan Ba­choo

The To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) made a last ditch ef­fort on Thurs­day to save a fam­i­ly’s home from be­ing de­mol­ished to make way for the ANR Robin­son Air­port Ex­pan­sion by fil­ing an in­junc­tion.

A re­lease from the THA said the Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands re­ceived in­struc­tions to pause the process of de­mol­ish­ing the Per­cy’s res­i­dence at Crown Point.

Just af­ter 8 am, of­fi­cers moved in­to Cromp­ton Trace to ex­e­cute an evic­tion or­der. One man shout­ed, “My grand­fa­ther liv­ing here boy!” as he had to be re­strained by res­i­dents.

A se­nior of­fi­cial from the Of­fice of the Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands con­firmed three war­rants of pos­ses­sion were ex­e­cut­ed yes­ter­day.

The of­fi­cial not­ed that sev­er­al steps were tak­en be­fore fil­ing the war­rants and that of­fers of com­pen­sa­tion were al­so made by NID­CO.

Work­men could be seen tak­ing fur­ni­ture out of the home.

Ear­li­er in the day. Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine ex­pressed his frus­tra­tion at the is­sue.

“So you wrote sev­en peo­ple, but you tar­get­ed one this morn­ing,” he said at the post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil meet­ing. “In tar­get­ing the one, I spent the morn­ing on the phone with the se­nior State Coun­cil try­ing to work out what the le­gal po­si­tion of the THA is on the mat­ter to bring re­lief to the res­i­dents,” he said

A pre­vi­ous in­junc­tion was filed by the res­i­dents nam­ing the THA as de­fen­dants.

One res­i­dent, Ken­roy Thomas said the Prime Min­is­ter did not ne­go­ti­ate prop­er­ly with the res­i­dents. He lashed out at Dr Row­ley for not meet­ing with the peo­ple.

“You came here to To­ba­go, spent a whole week and more play­ing golf at Mag­dale­na, you nev­er came here one day to speak with res­i­dents to see what go­ing on,” Thomas said.

Res­i­dents say they are not against mov­ing but not un­der the cur­rent con­di­tions.

“If the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment would have cre­at­ed Orop­une Gar­dens for the re­lo­ca­tion of peo­ple who lived in Pi­ar­co at that time, how is it for To­bag­o­ni­ans less is be­ing done?” asked chair­man of the Peace Ne­go­ti­a­tion Move­ment, Rhon­da Hack­ett.

Au­gus­tine said the pay out was too low.

He said, “We want to give the peo­ple small change and say go on, go your way with four hun­dred and some­thing thou­sand dol­lars. What can they re­al­ly re­build? What house can they re­al­ly re­build with that? And none of these things were con­sid­ered by the com­mis­sion­er of state lands by the cen­tral gov­ern­ment or by the THA.”