Say­ing gov­ern­ment is con­tin­u­ing to pe­nal­ize the poor, pres­i­dent of the San Fer­nan­do Busi­ness As­so­ci­a­tion Daphne Bartlett yes­ter­day lament­ed that the 2018/2019 fis­cal bud­get has lit­tle sup­port for farm­ers and small busi­ness own­ers.

In an in­ter­view, Bartlett said she ex­pect­ed more to be said on agri­cul­tur­al di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion, not­ing that the $1 in­crease in the price of su­per fu­el, will hit farm­ers and oth­er cit­i­zens hard in their pock­ets.

“Who buys pre­mi­um fu­el? The rich who can af­ford it. The poor­er and mid­dle class­es use su­per and once gas prices go up, every­thing goes up. We can ex­pect to see more prob­lems ahead,” Bartlett said.

She al­so said Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert did not an­swer ques­tions on Petrotrin.

“They have not been hon­est with the na­tion. You said they are do­ing 40,000 bar­rels per day with no ben­e­fit to the tax­pay­er. You can­not say that be­cause it is not true. They say we are los­ing US$3 a day when we re­fine a bar­rel of oil but that oc­curs when the oil price is low. Petrotrin has paid their tax­es from 2009 to 2015 to tune of $22 bil­lion and we ben­e­fit­ed from that,” Bartlett said.

She al­so said while she wel­comed the San­dals re­sort in To­ba­go, the gov­ern­ment had an oblig­a­tion to re­veal de­tails about the project.

“Are we build­ing it? Or are they build­ing it and we are man­ag­ing it? What is the arrange­ment?” she asked. She al­so said the Chi­nese dry-dock­ing project in La Brea sound­ed good ini­tial­ly but af­ter she did her re­search she re­alised that the project will not bring long-term ben­e­fit to the peo­ple of T&T.

“We could have built it our­selves and owned it? The Chi­nese are colonis­ing many coun­tries in the world. They al­ready own quar­ter of Ja­maica. They of­fer loans and when you can­not re­pay, they take over.”

She al­so said that Im­bert spoke about the train­ing 300 more doc­tors at the Teach­ing Hos­pi­tal but this was non­sen­si­cal as many qual­i­fied doc­tors are find­ing dif­fi­cul­ties in get­ting work.

“I have em­ployed a few of them at my es­tab­lish­ment and they are work­ing for a lit­tle more than min­i­mum wage,” she said.

Bartlett said she was hap­py that the San Fer­nan­do wa­ter­front project will fi­nal­ly get off the ground say­ing the con­struc­tion of an ad­min­is­tra­tive com­plex with 300 park­ing spaces will bring great ben­e­fit to San Fer­nan­di­ans. She not­ed that the bud­get ap­peared to be an elec­tion bud­get be­cause of the in­creas­es in pen­sion and grants.

“The fact that you tar­get­ing 27,000 pen­sion­ers with in­creased pen­sion and ad­di­tion­al grants to the dis­abled shows that you are prepar­ing for elec­tions be­cause while Petrotrin work­ers and their fam­i­lies will not vote for you, pen­sion­ers will come out and vote,” she said.

Im­bert in his pre­sen­ta­tion said the new wa­ter­front project will be com­plet­ed in 2020 at a cost of $144 mil­lion. He said there will be the recla­ma­tion of lands at Kings Wharf North at cost of $57 mil­lion, con­struc­tion of a fish­ing jet­ty and con­struc­tion of medi­um in­come hous­es at La­dy Hailes us­ing a pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship. He al­so said the $77 mil­lion Moru­ga in­dus­tri­al park will be com­plet­ed by March 2019 and will as­sist farm­ers with agro-pro­cess­ing.