Geisha Kow­lessar

The Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (Ude­cott) cur­rent­ly has a man­date of 74 projects, cost­ing just over $19 bil­lion.So said Jear­lean John as she was reap­point­ed as the com­pa­ny's chair­man at a brief cer­e­mo­ny at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.Say­ing board mem­bers were "re­al­ly tak­ing care of Ude­cott's busi­ness," John point­ed out that the or­gan­i­sa­tion no longer made the front pages of the news­pa­pers in a neg­a­tive way.

"It is not by guess we have tak­en our­selves off the front pages. Ude­cott will con­tin­ue to dili­gent­ly de­liv­er on its man­date," John added.Ude­cott was the sub­ject of the Uff com­mis­sion of en­quiry, which tabled 91 rec­om­men­da­tions. John said 45 of these di­rect­ly ap­plied to Ude­cott and all were im­ple­ment­ed.Say­ing dur­ing her ini­tial tenure she led a ma­jor over­haul of all sys­tems and pro­ce­dures John said all of Ude­cott's projects were now sub­ject to open pol­i­cy ten­der.

"Ude­cott has hired high­ly qual­i­fied and ex­pe­ri­enced staff and new de­part­ments have been es­tab­lished."Ude­cott has a new ten­ders com­mit­tee, of which I chose not to be a part and for the very first time in the com­pa­ny's his­to­ry a pro­cure­ment de­part­ment was es­tab­lished with a man­ag­er and pro­cure­ment of­fi­cers hired," John added.Al­so for the first time, she said, the com­pa­ny had a fa­cil­i­ties man­age­ment de­part­ment.

To en­sure the post of chair­man and CEO were kept sep­a­rate, John said the of­fice of the CEO was rein­tro­duced so there was no con­flict of in­ter­est and over­lap of du­ties and al­so to en­sure that trans­paren­cy was al­ways main­tained."The process­es and pro­ce­dures for the con­struc­tion records and doc­u­ment man­age­ment and fi­nance de­part­ments were re­vamped and/or over­hauled, in­clud­ing the in­tro­duc­tion of new IT sys­tems and tech­nolo­gies," John added.

Se­nior project man­agers and le­gal of­fi­cers al­so at­tend­ed train­ing ses­sions in April and May last year.Out­lin­ing some of Ude­cott's projects over the last two years, John said those in­clud­ed:

�2 Re­lo­cat­ing Par­lia­ment to Tow­er D at The Wa­ter­front Com­plex, which was done with­in time and bud­get

�2 Retro­fitting the Chancery Lane Ad­min­is­tra­tive Com­plex in­to the new San Fer­nan­do Teach­ing Hos­pi­tal

�2 Start­ing con­struc­tion of eight state-of-the-art po­lice sta­tions

�2 Em­bark­ing on fit­ting out the gov­ern­ment cam­pus plaza which has a to­tal of 1,363,624 square feet of space.