Port-of-Spain May­or Chin­ua Al­leyne is re­veal­ing that two city garbage trucks were de­lib­er­ate­ly sab­o­taged, an in­ci­dent that has in­ten­si­fied the city’s long­stand­ing san­i­ta­tion chal­lenges. At a press con­fer­ence at City Hall yes­ter­day, Al­leyne said mo­tor oil had been poured in­to the ra­di­a­tors of the trucks in May, ren­der­ing them non-func­tion­al. The sab­o­tage was doc­u­ment­ed in a June 2025 re­port by the city’s trans­port and cleans­ing de­part­ment and has been re­ferred to the city po­lice for ur­gent in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

“This is a very sig­nif­i­cant is­sue and one that has se­ri­ous im­pli­ca­tions for the clean­li­ness of our city,” Al­leyne said. He ex­plained that the sab­o­tage com­pounds an al­ready dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion fol­low­ing the re­cent clo­sure of the Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) across Trinidad, in­clud­ing in Port-of-Spain. CEPEP had been re­spon­si­ble for en­vi­ron­men­tal main­te­nance in var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties, and its sud­den clo­sure has left some ar­eas un­main­tained.

The may­or high­light­ed that the city’s garbage col­lec­tion sys­tem is di­vid­ed: the west­ern half is ser­viced by the cor­po­ra­tion’s own staff and fleet, while the east­ern half is man­aged through con­tracts. Al­leyne said much of the city’s fleet is age­ing, with some com­pactor trucks over ten years old, and parts of the fleet date back to 2013. “Be­cause of the age of the fleet, we ex­pe­ri­ence sig­nif­i­cant break­downs,” he said, not­ing that over the past two fi­nan­cial years, the coun­cil has in­vest­ed more than $2 mil­lion in fleet main­te­nance. De­spite this in­vest­ment, he said, the re­li­a­bil­i­ty of the trucks re­mains a chal­lenge, with com­pactor re­pairs of­ten tak­ing pri­or­i­ty over oth­er main­te­nance due to the ur­gency of san­i­ta­tion needs.

Al­leyne out­lined the coun­cil’s strat­e­gy to ad­dress both im­me­di­ate and long-term san­i­ta­tion needs. The coun­cil has iden­ti­fied near­ly $18 mil­lion in un­spent bal­ances from pre­vi­ous pub­lic sec­tor in­vest­ment projects, which will be redi­rect­ed to ac­quire new com­pactor trucks, dump trucks, back­hoes, and oth­er es­sen­tial ve­hi­cles. The may­or stressed that the ac­qui­si­tion process in­volves over­seas man­u­fac­tur­ing, with lead times of eight to ten months, and that prepa­ra­tions are al­ready un­der­way to en­sure time­ly de­liv­ery.

In ad­di­tion, the coun­cil has ap­proved a pi­lot project to pur­chase street sweep­ing ma­chines to im­prove road clean­li­ness and sup­ple­ment ex­ist­ing san­i­ta­tion ef­forts. Train­ing for staff in fleet man­age­ment and op­er­a­tion of the new ve­hi­cles will be con­duct­ed in part­ner­ship with the Trinidad and To­ba­go Reg­i­ment, May­or Al­leyne said, em­pha­sis­ing the im­por­tance of prepar­ing per­son­nel to man­age the up­grad­ed fleet ef­fi­cient­ly.

He al­so ad­dressed the fi­nan­cial ap­proval process, not­ing that a re­cent ap­pli­ca­tion for ad­di­tion­al funds through the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment was not suc­cess­ful due to the tim­ing with­in the fi­nan­cial year. “We have had to look in­ter­nal­ly at the re­sources avail­able to us, and we are con­fi­dent that the funds iden­ti­fied in our un­spent bal­ance ac­count will al­low us to make these crit­i­cal in­vest­ments,” he said.