Richard Lord

?The Gov­ern­ment ad­mit­ted yes­ter­day that it could not say what would be the fi­nal cost of the Tarou­ba Sport­ing Com­plex in south Trinidad or when it would be com­plet­ed.

This is ac­cord­ing to Sports Min­is­ter Gary Hunt, while re­spond­ing to a ques­tion on the Or­der Pa­per in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives yes­ter­day. The ques­tion was posed by Ca­roni Cen­tral MP Dr Hamza Rafeeq, who want­ed to know:

�2 The pro­ject­ed cost of the en­tire project.

�2 The amount of mon­ey al­ready spent on it.

�2 The ex­pect­ed com­ple­tion date.

�2 The pro­ject­ed an­nu­al cost of main­te­nance of the com­plex af­ter com­ple­tion of con­struc­tion.

Hunt was not in a po­si­tion to an­swer Rafeeq's con­cerns about the fi­nal cost or com­ple­tion date. The com­plex, which orig­i­nal­ly com­prised the Bri­an Lara Crick­et Sta­di­um and the Bri­an Lara Crick­et Acad­e­my, was ini­tial­ly pro­ject­ed to cost $275 mil­lion. Hunt said yes­ter­day: "It is not fea­si­ble to give a pro­ject­ed cost for the en­tire sport­ing com­plex and all the planned in­fra­struc­ture as the user brief for all sport­ing in­fra­struc­ture is not yet com­plete." He gave a sim­i­lar an­swer with re­spect to the com­ple­tion date for the project. "It is not fea­si­ble to give the com­ple­tion date for the en­tire sport­ing com­plex," he said.

Hunt al­so con­firmed that some $700 mil­lion had been spent on the project, which was be­ing man­aged by the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (Ude­cott). He gave a break­down:

�2 Site works, drainage, roads and util­i­ties–$108,697,537 (plus Vat).

�2 Sta­di­um struc­ture–$419,536,998 (Vat ex­clu­sive).

�2 Project de­sign, project man­age­ment, con­struc­tion man­age­ment, con­sul­tants, Os­ha, se­cu­ri­ty and site of­fice–$103,687,327.

He al­so said it was "not fea­si­ble to give a pro­ject­ed main­te­nance cost of the en­tire sport­ing com­plex, as the user brief for each com­po­nent of the planned com­plex is not yet com­plete." Hunt re­vealed that "ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion" would be among the 13 fa­cil­i­ties be­ing con­struct­ed at the com­plex. He said an en­er­gy and tech­nol­o­gy park, an elite cen­tre of ex­cel­lence for sport sci­ence/ sports med­i­cine, an aquat­ic cen­tre, a cen­tre for field/house sports (bas­ket­ball, net­ball, vol­ley­ball and bad­minton) and a box­ing and mar­tial arts cen­tre would al­so be con­struct­ed on the 627-acre site.