Hous­ing and Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Pen­ne­lope Beck­les turned the sod on Fri­day for Phase I of the Petrotrin Res­i­den­tial Lots Pro­gramme at the Glen­roy II site, in Princes Town.

The pro­gramme, launched in 2020 for for­mer em­ploy­ees of Petrotrin who were ter­mi­nat­ed in No­vem­ber 2018, fol­low­ing the clo­sure of the re­fin­ery, pro­vides ser­vice­able lots of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5,000 square feet for a lease pe­ri­od of 199 years, with all of the re­quired in­fra­struc­ture, lo­ti­fi­ca­tion and statu­to­ry ap­provals free of charge.

The Land Set­tle­ment Agency (LSA) will be re­spon­si­ble for de­vel­op­ing the lots through the Pub­lic Sec­tor In­vest­ment Pro­gramme (PSIP) and the In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Fund (IDF) while the Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands will be re­spon­si­ble for is­su­ing the lease ti­tles for the land.

In keep­ing with the Min­istry’s Aid­ed Self-Help Hous­ing mod­el, pre-ap­proved house plans, tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance and over­sight for the con­struc­tion of the hous­es would be pro­vid­ed by the LSA, while sub­si­dized loans can be ac­cessed through the Trinidad and To­ba­go Mort­gage Fi­nance Com­pa­ny (TTMF) for el­i­gi­ble ap­pli­cants re­quir­ing mort­gage fa­cil­i­ties for home con­struc­tion.

Ap­pli­ca­tions, which have been re­ceived from el­i­gi­ble, for­mer em­ploy­ees for the lots, have been en­tered in­to the Min­istry’s data­base and will be se­lect­ed when each of the nine sites cur­rent­ly ear­marked for the pro­gramme is ready for dis­tri­b­u­tion, us­ing the Min­istry’s ran­dom se­lec­tion draw process.

Beck­les said that “the Gov­ern­ment is com­mit­ted to work­ing in the best in­ter­ests of all cit­i­zens, and as such is do­ing all it can to cush­ion the ef­fects of the fall­out in­curred from the Petrotrin clo­sure, ever mind­ful that ac­cess to these res­i­den­tial lots can be a re­al game-chang­er in im­prov­ing the so­cio-eco­nom­ic prospects of these ex-em­ploy­ees.”

She added that “by en­abling our cit­i­zens a path­way to prop­er­ty own­er­ship, we are not just meet­ing a fam­i­ly’s need for safe and se­cure shel­ter and the abil­i­ty to earn a liv­ing through agri­cul­tur­al pur­suits, but we are al­so pro­vid­ing a tan­gi­ble op­por­tu­ni­ty that will change their lives for­ev­er.”