Sev­en­ty-two of the 114 em­ploy­ees at the Civil­ian Con­ser­va­tion Corps (CCC) are be­ing sent home at the end of the month, af­ter re­ceiv­ing just a one-month con­tract ex­ten­sion, sources say.

Ac­cord­ing to a let­ter seen by Guardian Me­dia, short-term em­ploy­ees, among them De­fence Force mem­bers who were ad­min­is­ter­ing the mil­i­tary as­pect of the pro­gramme, were en­gaged with­out en­ti­tle­ments to va­ca­tion or sick leave and were in­formed that the arrange­ment could be end­ed by ei­ther par­ty with one month’s no­tice. One such con­tract of­fers em­ploy­ment set to end on Ju­ly 31.

The CCC pro­gramme, which was ex­pect­ed to restart in Jan­u­ary, nev­er did and re­mained on hold.

Sources claim it was paused by the for­mer Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion ahead of the April 28 Gen­er­al Elec­tion and now ap­pears to be fac­ing shut­down un­der the new Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress-led Gov­ern­ment.

New trainees who have been await­ing the start of the pro­gramme have re­port­ed­ly been bom­bard­ing re­gion­al man­agers for up­dates af­ter word of the pend­ing ter­mi­na­tion was cir­cu­lat­ed on so­cial me­dia.

Mean­while, con­cerns are mount­ing about the state of the CCC’s fa­cil­i­ties. Work­ers are be­ing housed in a build­ing at Beetham Gar­dens, rent­ed from the Ve­hi­cle Man­age­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go Lim­it­ed (VM­COTT), which sources de­scribe as di­lap­i­dat­ed. The CCC’s of­fi­cial head­quar­ters al­so re­mains in dis­re­pair, de­spite fund­ing hav­ing been al­lo­cat­ed for up­grades.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to Min­is­ter Phillip Watts, un­der whose purview the CCC falls, for com­ment last night but was un­suc­cess­ful in get­ting him.