To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine is ap­peal­ing to the Gov­ern­ment to work with him to en­sure those who need to be moved to make way for the ANR Robin­son In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port ex­pan­sion get their fair share.

Speak­ing to the me­dia in To­ba­go on Tues­day, Au­gus­tine said while To­ba­go needs the ex­pan­sion project in Crown Point, he can­not sup­port cit­i­zens be­ing kicked out of their homes and not paid a fair price.

Re­veal­ing some of the com­pen­sa­tion pack­ages made to res­i­dents of Zone D, Au­gus­tine said the State was not of­fer­ing these fam­i­lies enough mon­ey.

Last week, an at­tempt was made to evict res­i­dents of Cromp­ston Trace, off Silk Cot­ton Road, as the State gears up to be­gin ma­jor work on the $1.2 bil­lion project.

The project is be­ing man­aged by the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd, which has a $300 mil­lion bud­get for land ac­qui­si­tion.

On Tues­day, Au­gus­tine said he was shown of­fers made to the Per­cy fam­i­ly.

“One of those let­ters, they say that they wish to give them $400,000 and the oth­er is $500,000. In the con­text of To­ba­go, that’s not a lot of mon­ey to pur­chase land and re­build, giv­en that at this mo­ment, the av­er­age cost of a lot of land is around the $300,000 mark,” Au­gus­tine said.

He said he was hop­ing the THA could work with State to en­sure the ac­qui­si­tions were hu­mane.

A large part of this, he said, was en­sur­ing the promis­es of the pre­vi­ous THA ad­min­is­tra­tion were kept.

He said work in the Cove, the area iden­ti­fied for the re­lo­ca­tion of some of the af­fect­ed fam­i­lies, had stopped be­fore the 2021 THA elec­tion.

“Four homes were built, three are avail­able and of the three, they have no sep­tic sys­tem, no elec­tric­i­ty, no WASA ap­provals still and this go­ing on for more than two years, al­most three years or more and still those things that the THA promised that it would pro­vide as av­enues to move peo­ple smooth­ly and ef­fort­less­ly, those have not been pro­vid­ed,” Au­gus­tine said.

He said since his ad­min­is­tra­tion took of­fice, they had been try­ing to re­solve those is­sues. But he said hav­ing been in pow­er for on­ly eight months, they had not made sig­nif­i­cant progress yet.

“I am say­ing let us work with the res­i­dents and try to move them speed­i­ly. In ab­sence of that, we would just be tak­ing away peo­ple’s birth rights and kick­ing them out in the wilder­ness and I don’t think that is fair,” he said.

Au­gus­tine said while some would ar­gue that the law al­lowed the State to seize the lands it need­ed, he would not sup­port such “dra­con­ian” mea­sures.