As the mad rush to have ve­hi­cles in­spect­ed and cer­ti­fied con­tin­ues, Mi­nor­i­ty Leader Wat­son Duke is call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment to “be rea­son­able” in en­forc­ing the Mo­tor Ve­hi­cle and Road Traf­fic Act as two of three work­ing au­tho­rised ve­hi­cle in­spec­tion sta­tions, ser­vice the en­tire of To­ba­go

Both are lo­cat­ed on the west­ern end of the is­land—the Li­cens­ing De­part­ment on Shir­van Road, Buc­coo and Sylvester Au­to World, Sher­wood Park, Carn­bee.

The end-of-year rush to meet the le­gal re­quire­ment af­ter Gov­ern­ment ex­tend­ed the pe­ri­od for in­spec­tion by five months last year, ex­ac­er­bat­ed the prob­lem, Act­ing As­sis­tant Trans­port Com­mis­sion­er Michael Loo­by said.

He said the Li­cens­ing De­part­ment in To­ba­go ex­pe­ri­enced prob­lems meet­ing the in­creased de­mand.

“It’s an over­load of the sys­tem so we will get some needling prob­lems but we are deal­ing with them as they come.”

Asked if the Gov­ern­ment sta­tion ran out of in­spec­tion stick­ers as was re­port­ed on so­cial me­dia, Loo­by said the sta­tion “does not have stick­er prob­lem, as yet.”

“We are try­ing to keep abreast of what is hap­pen­ing. We had some lit­tle hic­cups...with the cer­ti­fied copy pa­per as it ran out and we had to send an SOS to Ca­roni to re­place it,” he said.

He added: “We al­so had an is­sue with the print­ing ma­chine for per­mits. We had a prob­lem with the spin­dle so we sent for that al­so.”

At Sylvester Au­to World, Sher­wood Park, Carnbe, traf­fic backed up, for miles, on the Auchenskeoch Buc­coo Bay Road, one of the main thor­ough­fares on that end of the is­land. Mean­while, Mi­nor­i­ty Leader Wat­son Duke high­light­ed the plight of one of his con­stituents in To­ba­go East by post­ing the video with the man’s com­plaints in a me­dia What­sApp chat group.

“I went on three oc­ca­sions to pay cash for my ve­hi­cle as I am self-em­ployed and I could not get any­one to take the mon­ey, hun­dreds of peo­ple were in front of me,” the con­stituent Stephen O’Neil told Duke.

O’Neil added: “We lined up for three days, the whole day and when we reached up, one of the at­ten­dants said there is no none to take the mon­ey as the of­fice is closed and we have to wait.”

The self-em­ployed man said not hav­ing the in­spec­tion stick­er, on his ve­hi­cle, is pre­vent­ing him from earn­ing a liv­ing as he now has to take a reg­u­lar taxi to Scar­bor­ough.

Duke, in call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment to show re­straint said: “I want to ask Min­is­ter Sinanan that he be rea­son­able in his ap­proach in en­forc­ing the law. These are law-abid­ing cit­i­zens who wish to obey the law but due to the fact, there are lim­it­ed sta­tions that cer­ti­fy ve­hi­cles they are with­out luck.