Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

In his first press con­fer­ence as Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, Faris Al-Rawi yes­ter­day put forth op­ti­mistic trans­for­ma­tive plans for the coun­try once the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Re­form leg­is­la­tion is passed in the near fu­ture.

Dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence on Thurs­day, Al-Rawi said cit­i­zens could ex­pect to be a part of the so­lu­tion as tech­nol­o­gy is in­te­grat­ed in­to op­er­a­tions, al­low­ing griev­ances to be re­port­ed im­me­di­ate­ly.

“We are in a process of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. We will be launch­ing, in the month of May—all things be­ing equal—our apps which have been de­signed,” he said.

“We then have per­sons able to ge­o­t­ag where their leaks are, where their lights have prob­lems, where col­lec­tions have not hap­pened, where their over­grown lots are- what­ev­er the ser­vices are.”

He al­so said that the Cab­i­net had ap­proved a na­tion­al clean-up and sur­vey ex­er­cise to take place by month’s end. He said the sur­vey will make note of in­fra­struc­tur­al re­pairs need­ed, par­tic­u­lar­ly to the 80 per cent of roads in the coun­try un­der its re­mit.

He said peo­ple could even use the app when it is launched to re­port pot­holes.

He said the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port, Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture and Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries and a sec­ondary roads com­pa­ny com­ing in­to his min­istry will be seek­ing rec­om­men­da­tions for “al­ter­na­tive tech­niques to tra­di­tion­al road sur­fac­ing.”

“Our is­sue with road con­di­tions in Trinidad and in To­ba­go is large­ly be­cause soil sta­bil­i­ty, road sta­bil­i­ty, is dif­fer­ent from area to area but there are tech­niques that we are aware of in the min­istry,” he said.

He said the sec­ondary road com­pa­ny will al­so be de­vel­op­ing stan­dards for re­pairs that are more ef­fec­tive and cost-ef­fi­cient.

With­in the sur­vey ex­er­cise, he said, or­phan roads - those which aren’t not­ed in the re­spec­tive re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion’s records - will be ad­dressed.

“If these things are not vest­ed in a cor­po­ra­tion, the cor­po­ra­tion can­not spend tax­pay­ing dol­lars on it. This is the con­cept of what we call or­phan roads,” he said.

“So part of this ex­er­cise is to iden­ti­fy all of the or­phan roads and or­phan fa­cil­i­ties and then to im­me­di­ate­ly see them vest­ed in the cor­po­ra­tions so that peo­ple can have re­lief de­liv­ered to them.”

He said mu­nic­i­pal po­lice ser­vice will be ex­pand­ed from 700 of­fi­cers to 1,500.

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