KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

Mil­lions of tax­pay­ers’ dol­lars could be lost at the trou­bled Ridgeview Heights hous­ing de­vel­op­ment in Bon Air North, where Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Hous­ing Phillip Alexan­der says some un­fin­ished struc­tures may now have to be de­mol­ished be­cause of ma­jor struc­tur­al prob­lems.

Af­ter tour­ing the stalled de­vel­op­ment last Fri­day, Alexan­der blamed for­mer hous­ing min­is­ter Camille Robin­son-Reg­is for the state of the project, claim­ing mil­lions were spent on par­tial­ly com­plet­ed units.

“Every­thing here be­hind you, all of it has to be de­mol­ished. This is more Tre­strail. This is more Las Al­turas. This was paid for by the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC), un­der Camille Robin­son-Reg­is, and now tax­pay­ers have to foot the bill again for an­oth­er de­mo­li­tion, an­oth­er PNM fail­ure that we have to de­mol­ish.”

Alexan­der de­scribed it as the “worst of the worst” of the HDC projects he has vis­it­ed since tak­ing of­fice.

He said HDC is now try­ing to quan­ti­fy the po­ten­tial loss­es and de­ter­mine what parts of the de­vel­op­ment, if any, can be sal­vaged.

He is al­so ques­tion­ing whether ad­e­quate ge­ot­ech­ni­cal work was done af­ter the land was cut and filled for con­struc­tion.

Alexan­der said he had re­quest­ed the most re­cent ge­ot­ech­ni­cal sur­vey for the de­vel­op­ment be­fore vis­it­ing the site but was in­formed that HDC had no such sur­vey on file fol­low­ing the cut­ting and fill­ing works.

He said an ear­li­er sur­vey ex­ist­ed but ques­tioned what tech­ni­cal in­for­ma­tion con­trac­tors sub­se­quent­ly re­lied on af­ter the ter­rain was al­tered.

Ex­plain­ing that por­tions of the moun­tain­ous site had been cut to cre­ate lev­el ar­eas, with ex­ca­vat­ed ma­te­r­i­al then used as fill else­where, Alexan­der claimed there was no ev­i­dence be­fore him that the filled area had been prop­er­ly com­pact­ed be­fore con­struc­tion.

He said, “It looks like no com­pact­ing was done af­ter to make it build­able, and no sur­vey was done to find out what type of foun­da­tion to use here.”

Alexan­der said the prob­lems now be­ing as­sessed mean some un­fin­ished struc­tures can­not sim­ply be com­plet­ed and hand­ed over to ap­pli­cants.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Alexan­der said the prob­lems at Ridgeview Heights ex­tend be­yond the struc­tur­al con­cerns.

Cit­ing an HDC fact sheet dur­ing the tour, he claimed HDC spent al­most $165,992,000 on par­tial­ly com­plet­ed units at the de­vel­op­ment.

He al­so al­leged pay­ments had pro­gressed sig­nif­i­cant­ly even though some of the struc­tures re­mained sub­stan­tial­ly in­com­plete.

Ac­cord­ing to Alexan­der, an agree­ment was even­tu­al­ly reached be­tween the HDC and the con­trac­tor to pay for work com­plet­ed up to that point and ter­mi­nate the project.

He claimed, “This project was stalled by Camille Robin­son-Reg­is”.

Alexan­der did not stop there, al­so ques­tion­ing whether tax­pay­ers re­ceived val­ue for mon­ey on the units that were con­struct­ed.

He es­ti­mat­ed apart­ments at Ridgeview Heights could sell for no more than ap­prox­i­mate­ly $600,000.

How­ev­er, he claimed the HDC, un­der the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment ad­min­is­tra­tion, en­tered in­to an agree­ment to con­struct the units at ap­prox­i­mate­ly $1.2 mil­lion each.

“These apart­ments here can­not sell for more than $600,000 in this area, best con­di­tion, best fin­ish­es. But the HDC, un­der the PNM, un­der Camille Robin­son-Reg­is, en­tered in­to an agree­ment to build these units at $1.2 mil­lion.”

Alexan­der fur­ther claimed an $80 mil­lion cost over­run even­tu­al­ly pushed the av­er­age cost of a hab­it­able town­house to al­most $1.5 mil­lion.

He said, “That’s near­ly three times the price of what could be sold here.”

Alexan­der said HDC chair­man Feeroz Khan in­formed him that the Cor­po­ra­tion’s board was now seek­ing le­gal ad­vice on whether mon­ey could be re­cov­ered in re­la­tion to the project.

He added, “The board, I was told by the chair­man to­day (Fri­day), are seek­ing le­gal ad­vice as to how to re­cov­er what went on here.”

Alexan­der said the cur­rent HDC team was ex­am­in­ing the de­vel­op­ment to de­ter­mine the ex­tent of the fi­nan­cial loss while try­ing to iden­ti­fy which por­tions could still be com­plet­ed.

He said the prob­lems en­coun­tered at Ridgeview Heights al­so il­lus­trat­ed why the Gov­ern­ment has not been able to im­me­di­ate­ly com­plete and dis­trib­ute some HDC projects in­her­it­ed from the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Alexan­der said, “A lot of the projects that were un­der con­struc­tion un­der the PNM, we have to ex­am­ine to make sure that they’re safe to put peo­ple in. That’s where we are to­day, try­ing to quan­ti­fy the size of the loss of the project here while we try to get them fin­ished so that we can hand over keys.”

When asked how many HDC hous­es were dis­trib­uted for the year, Alexan­der could not say.

Ef­forts to con­tact Robin­son-Reg­is for a re­sponse to Alexan­der’s al­le­ga­tions were un­suc­cess­ful up to press time.