Laying his management plan in the first part of his two-part address to the nation last evening, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley said his administration’s plan for the country would cost taxpayers $12.5 billion—less than half of what his predecessors wasted. The $29 billion in wasted funds, he indicated, was cold hard cash which was on hand and this figure excluded other forms of expenditures.
Within his plan included expenditure on projects such as $2 billion on repairs at the Port-of- Spain General Hospital, creating a La Brea dry dock, and on housing programmes respectively.
He also planned a $1 billion expenditure on the Dragon gas pipeline, resort tourism project, the Tobago airport terminal, purchase of two new ferries for Tobago, and the San Fernando waterfront project respectively.
Rowley also put forth expenditures of $850 million for the construction of the Sangre Grande Hospital and $600 million for the purchase of two Coast Guard vessels.
“Look at the things that have not been done in Trinidad and Tobago and which now fall for this government to do,” he said “and if we had access to this kind of cash, or to borrow against it look what we could have done (pointing at his listed projects and plans).”
Port-of-Spain General Hospital
In 2009, the main tower in the Port-of-Spain General Hospital was assessed by engineers to be structurally unsound and following last August’s 6.9 magnitude earthquake which shook the country. The Government was forced to evacuate the tower in order to tear it down and rebuild it. “If we had built that, and that was deemed a priority of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago in 2009—it is now being addressed,” he said.
La Brea Dry Dock
Rowley said this project is being done to capitalise on the country’s geographic proximity to the Panama Canal so that ships that are traversing the Atlantic to the Pacific through Panama could get serviced in T&T, creating jobs and generating foreign exchange income. “The Chinese are offering to come in with us. They will take up 30 per cent, we would have to be good for 70 per cent,” he said.
Tobago
“For the last 36 months in this country, the conversation, the biggest scandal in my Government according to some people is the ferry, the ferry, the ferry, the ferry,” Rowley said.
He said the previous administration mismanaged the two used ferries which previously serviced the inter-island sea bridge, “running them into the ground.” He blamed the People’s Partnership administration for now forcing them to have to purchase two new ferries to help service the sea bridge. Rowley also blamed the previous administration and naysayers for denying Tobago a Sandals resort which they would have constructed to help diversify the economy and bring in much-needed tourists.
The Tobago airport terminal, Rowley said, was necessary to bring the island’s tourism into modern times. “As it stands now if a jumbo jet lands in Tobago and starts to offload or is loading, people are out in the carpark waiting to get on the plane and if it’s raining, you can’t get off the plane into the airport—that is not how you do tourism in 2019. We need a proper airport terminal and we doing that now,” he said.
San Fernando Waterfront project
The Prime Minister said this project is necessary to boost the city’s economy as, “San Fernando is the only waterfront city in the Caribbean and possibly the world where the waterfront is a dump.”