Kevon Felmine

Works and In­fra­struc­ture Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er has been ad­vised by his per­ma­nent sec­re­tary, Cheryl Black­man, to choose his projects be­cause funds are lim­it­ed. Yes­ter­day, as Warn­er and of­fi­cials from the min­istry toured the Na­pari­ma and Moru­ga/Table­land dis­tricts to view some of the re­port­ed 200 land­slips in the area, he asked Black­man if there was enough mon­ey to re­pair the road. Black­man replied: "Min­is­ter, you have so many peo­ple ask­ing you and it is ur­gent all over. You will have to de­ter­mine what is the pri­or­i­ty. Res­i­dents were pleased when Warn­er said he planned to give pri­or­i­ty the road, which is bad­ly af­fect­ed by poor drainage and filled with pot­holes. He said the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment was not ful­ly able to deal with the mas­sive road re­pairs in the dis­trict.

"Through­out the south­ern re­gion, there seems to be prob­lems with the roads," he said. "The coun­cil­lor could try but there are some roads which come un­der the lo­cal gov­ern­ment that they can't fix. "They don't have the fund­ing for it, they don't have the ex­per­tise, they don't have the equip­ment. "I think it is un­fair to ask lo­cal gov­ern­ment to fix roads like these, which are of course out­side their com­pe­tence," Warn­er said. The day start­ed with Warn­er view­ing a ma­jor land­slip at Sec­ond Av­enue, Table­land, where the road­way slipped away three years ago leav­ing some res­i­dents strand­ed.

A tem­po­rary road was con­struct­ed along a piece of land be­long­ing to Shas­tri See­baran who said be­cause he ap­proached Warn­er for the re­pair works he has been ig­nored by the Princes Town Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion.

See­baran said when he went to the cor­po­ra­tion, he was told the road had been con­demned. Warn­er said mon­ey was al­lo­cat­ed for the re­pairs but noth­ing had been done. He said tests and es­ti­mates had al­ready been done and asked for a month to have the prob­lem rec­ti­fied. The min­is­ter vis­it­ed the home of Cyn­thia Lee who died a month ago. Her son, Ronald Lee, claimed she died of grief be­cause of the state of the home. Parts of Lee's house col­lapsed and was on the verge of crum­bling be­cause of a land­slip at the back of the struc­ture. The par­ty al­so toured a sev­er­al ar­eas, in­clud­ing Ramkisson Trace and La­pai Road, where road re­pairs were ex­pect­ed to be done soon.