Camille Mceach­nie

Ven­dors at the Or­ange Hill, Shaw Park tem­po­rary mar­ket can move in­to the re­mod­elled $31 mil­lion Scar­bor­ough mar­ket in just over one month.

The re­mod­elled fa­cil­i­ty is 95 per cent com­plete, on time and with­in bud­get.

So says sec­re­tary of Food Pro­duc­tion, Forestry and Fish­eries Hay­den Spencer at this week’s post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil me­dia brief­ing held at the Tourism Di­vi­sion’s Scar­bor­ough head­quar­ters on Wednes­day.

“The project is 95 per cent com­plete. The con­trac­tor will now fo­cus on mi­nor in­te­ri­or works, putting up doors and land­scap­ing,” Spencer said.

He said Al­pha En­gi­neer­ing and Con­struc­tion Lim­it­ed of Trinidad, the con­trac­tor who won the con­struc­tion bid for the project, gave a com­ple­tion date of Au­gust.

The sec­re­tary said the re­mod­elled fa­cil­i­ty will house more than 145 ven­dors, more than the pre­vi­ous struc­ture.

He said it pro­vides more space, in­clud­ing a des­ig­nat­ed con­fec­tionary ven­dors’ stand.

Speak­ing about the tem­po­rary mar­ket space at Shaw Park, Spencer said it will be “trans­formed in­to a farm­ers’ whole­sale mar­ket.”

“We will now have a farm­ers mar­ket there. We can­not say to the ven­dors, we want you to sup­port the lo­cal farm­ers and there is no whole­sale mar­ket.”

In Ju­ly 2018, at the sim­ple cer­e­mo­ny to sign the re­mod­el­ling con­tract, Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of the Eco-In­dus­tri­al De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny of To­ba­go (E-ID­COT) Lim­it­ed, Lois Leslie, said the bud­get for the project was $28 mil­lion.

Al­pha En­gi­neer­ing was se­lect­ed as the con­trac­tor from among four bid­ders. Bids for the project were in­vit­ed in June 2016.