Res­i­dents of Cromp­ston Trace, Crown Point, To­ba­go, yes­ter­day packed up the last rem­nants of their be­long­ings and va­cat­ed their prop­er­ties, five days af­ter the High Court dis­missed their ap­pli­ca­tion for a ju­di­cial re­view to halt the state’s land ac­qui­si­tion process.

The res­i­dents were oc­cu­py­ing lands in Zone D need­ed for the ANR Robin­son In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port ex­pan­sion project.

How­ev­er, they had been in­volved in a dis­pute with the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (Nid­co) over the amounts they were be­ing of­fered for their prop­er­ties and had re­fused to move pend­ing a res­o­lu­tion.

Last month, res­i­dents and po­lice clashed when au­thor­i­ties from the Chi­na Rail­way Con­struc­tion (Caribbean) Ltd, the con­trac­tor, at­tempt­ed to ex­e­cute an evic­tion or­der on the re­main­ing res­i­dents still at the site.

The res­i­dents were even­tu­al­ly giv­en a tem­po­rary re­prieve pend­ing a de­ter­mi­na­tion of the court mat­ter.

On Sep­tem­ber 9, how­ev­er, High Court Jus­tice Na­dia Kan­ga­loo dis­missed an ap­pli­ca­tion by res­i­dents for a ju­di­cial re­view to halt the ac­qui­si­tion process and they were giv­en un­til yes­ter­day to va­cate their prop­er­ties.

The air­port ex­pan­sion project is ex­pect­ed to cost 1.2 bil­lion dol­lars.