Loyse Vin­cent

To­bag­o­ni­ans are ask­ing for an ex­ten­sion of the mora­to­ri­um for ve­hi­cle in­spec­tions due to “cir­cum­stances spe­cif­ic to To­ba­go.”

Cur­rent­ly, there are two ve­hi­cle-test­ing sta­tions on the is­land, one at Sylvester’s Au­to Cen­tre at Carn­bee and the oth­er, VM­COTT at Shaw Park.

Yes­ter­day, Sylvester’s Au­to Cen­tre was closed. Own­er An­tho­ny Sylvester said he, too, felt frus­trat­ed by the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion.

“I have had to turn away scores of cus­tomers. Since De­cem­ber 20, I ran out of stick­ers and pa­per­work, so I have been un­able to do any­thing. As much as five days ago I was promised that I would re­ceive a batch of stick­ers, re­ceipts and so on. To­day is Fri­day, and I am still wait­ing. I just have to keep turn­ing away cus­tomers,” he said.

At the VM­COTT com­pound un Shaw Park, how­ev­er, there was a long line of peo­ple wait­ing to have their ve­hi­cles in­spect­ed. One of them, An­dre Lin­coln, said To­ba­go should be giv­en spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tion.

“We don’t have enough in­spec­tion cen­tres in To­ba­go. We used to have two, one in the east and the own­er died. Then we had one to ser­vice the en­tire is­land. This one at VM­COTT on­ly opened a month ago, and still that’s not enough for all the ve­hi­cles on the is­land,” he said.

An­oth­er mo­torist, Nigel Wal­lace, al­so be­lieved To­bag­o­ni­ans need ex­tra time.

“In ad­di­tion, there not be­ing enough garages cer­ti­fied to do the in­spec­tions, we have had sev­er­al in­stances where the stick­ers and re­ceipt books they sent to To­ba­go were not enough. Carn­bee does not have any.

“I came here two days ago and they could not do any in­spec­tions be­cause they didn’t have any stick­ers, but they got some last night (Thurs­day), so every­body flocked here to­day,” he said.

Wal­lace said he did not be­lieve all of the ve­hi­cles wait­ing on in­spec­tion would be checked be­fore the end of the day.

How­ev­er, Sec­re­tary in the Di­vi­sion of In­fra­struc­ture Quar­ries and the En­vi­ron­ment Kwe­si DesVi­gnes agreed with Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan that cit­i­zens have failed to use the five months grant­ed to them to be­come com­pli­ant with the law.

Des Vi­gnes said he as­signed of­fi­cers from the di­vi­sion to vis­it ser­vice cen­tres in the weeks lead­ing up to the De­cem­ber 31st dead­line to en­sure things were in place for the an­tic­i­pat­ed in­creased ac­tiv­i­ty and there were no long lines of peo­ple seek­ing in­spec­tions.