KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Should a re­quest for a meet­ing with Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley go an­swered, the Agri­cul­tur­al So­ci­ety (ASTT) and Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (FATT) say they will take the Gov­ern­ment to court over the pro­posed con­struc­tion of the North Grove hous­ing de­vel­op­ment on lands near the St Au­gus­tine Nurs­eries.

In a me­dia con­fer­ence on Thurs­day, sit­ting along­side en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist Dr Wayne Kublals­ingh, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the ASTT and the FATT said the Gov­ern­ment was not be­ing truth­ful to the pub­lic about the hous­ing de­vel­op­ment.

ASTT pres­i­dent Dhano Sookoo said that since Feb­ru­ary 16, the or­gan­i­sa­tion sent let­ters to the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA), the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC), the Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands and the Min­istry of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment seek­ing in­for­ma­tion but have re­ceived no re­spons­es.

Sookoo called on cit­i­zens to join with them on Mon­day as they de­liv­er a let­ter to Row­ley, re­quest­ing full con­sul­ta­tion on the project. Should there be no re­sponse with­in 10 days, they will pro­ceed with the court seek­ing an in­junc­tion against the grant­i­ng of the nec­es­sary ap­provals for the project.

The bod­ies were un­sure of the ba­sis for their le­gal chal­lenges as they were still seek­ing le­gal ad­vice.

How­ev­er, Sookoo claimed that the HDC had breached Town and Coun­try Plan­ning reg­u­la­tions. Al­so, she said that the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion had ap­plied to the EMA for a Cer­tifi­cate of En­vi­ron­men­tal Clear­ance for 300 units but were plan­ning on build­ing 500.

The group’s main con­cern was the im­pact the high-rise build­ings were go­ing to have on nurs­eries where the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture stores germplasm, which is a col­lec­tion of trees and plants from which var­i­ous strains are tak­en to pro­duce saplings. The bod­ies said that the soil type was sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly proven to sup­port germplasm, which can­not be re­plant­ed any­where else.

While Gov­ern­ment says that the nurs­eries have a land mass of 200 acres, of which on­ly 17 would be used, FATT pres­i­dent Shi­raz Khan said it was re­al­ly 77 acres of nurs­eries based on Town and Coun­try Plan­ning doc­u­ments. Khan said the ex­cuse that many of the cit­rus trees at the nurs­eries suf­fer from cit­rus green­ing dis­ease was rub­bished as it has been proven that the dis­ease can be man­aged like a virus and stopped from spread­ing.

Khan al­so ques­tioned Gov­ern­ment’s in­ten­tion of build­ing North Grove in Curepe which he said was al­ready dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed and con­gest­ed with traf­fic.