“The min­istry dropped a bomb on us.”

This was the sen­ti­ment of one of the five Curepe res­i­dents who now face evic­tion as the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port seeks to move ahead in the con­struc­tion of the Curepe In­ter­change.

“We were shocked by the press con­fer­ence,” said the res­i­dent, af­ter the learn­ing the min­istry had an­nounced its in­tent to ap­proach the High Court to evict them.

The res­i­dents have been at log­ger­heads with the min­istry con­cern­ing the val­u­a­tion of their land and by ex­ten­sion the com­pen­sa­tion they are to re­ceive for re­lo­ca­tion.

The res­i­dent, who asked not to be named, said they were of the be­lief that they had more time to ne­go­ti­ate as they had on­ly been served with the Sec­tion 4 no­tice in­di­cat­ing the gov­ern­ment had au­thor­i­ty to take the land last month.

Dur­ing the press con­fer­ence on Tues­day, Mar­vin Gon­za­les, di­rec­tor of le­gal ser­vices for the min­istry, said the res­i­dents had con­tin­u­ous­ly stalled ne­go­ti­a­tions as they twice fired at­tor­neys as lit­tle progress was made in talks with the Gov­ern­ment.

“To date, the min­istry has ex­haust­ed all pos­si­ble av­enues to al­low for just and rea­son­able so­lu­tions to reach a mu­tu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial set­tle­ment and the min­istry has al­lowed two sets of sec­tion four or­ders to lapse to give the res­i­dent enough time to ne­go­ti­ate their claims,” said Gon­za­les.

“The Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port will now ex­er­cise his pow­ers un­der the land ac­qui­si­tion act to sign war­rants and for­ward same to the mar­shal of the High Court to­day or­der­ing that the five re­main­ing res­i­dents be put out of pos­ses­sion of their prop­er­ties,” he added.

Gon­za­les said de­spite the State hir­ing an in­de­pen­dent land eval­u­a­tor, no agree­ment con­cern­ing com­pen­sa­tion had been reached and time was run­ning out be­fore the State would owe mil­lions to con­trac­tors due to de­lays.

“Giv­en its con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tions and the risk of hav­ing to pay costs to the con­trac­tor to the tune of mil­lions of dol­lars, the min­istry is left with no choice but to in­voke the on­ly op­tion avail­able to it un­der the Land Ac­qui­si­tion Act to fur­ther the in­ter­est of the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty in the pro­vi­sion of im­proved trans­port road net­works,” said Gon­za­les.

Di­rec­tor of High­ways Navin Ram­s­ingh al­so con­firmed dur­ing the press con­fer­ence that con­trac­tors had al­ready giv­en the State no­tice that ad­di­tion­al costs will be added due to the de­lays.

“So far, we have got­ten no­tice from the con­trac­tor with ef­fect from No­vem­ber 26 (2018) the State is li­able for the cost of de­lay be­cause of fail­ure to grant va­cant pos­ses­sion,” said Ram­s­ingh.

The min­istry twice is­sued Sec­tion 4 le­gal no­tices last year, in May and De­cem­ber, which stat­ed the min­istry had the le­gal au­thor­i­ty to take the lands.

Those no­tices ex­pire six months af­ter be­ing is­sued.

How­ev­er, the res­i­dent con­firmed that they were still be­ing giv­en a fi­nal chance to ac­cept an of­fer from the Gov­ern­ment as they were due to meet with the State eval­u­a­tor to­day.

How­ev­er, if the talks col­lapse once more, the res­i­dents stand to lose even more than their homes.

In De­cem­ber, the Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands is­sued a Res­i­den­tial Ten­an­cy Agree­ment, con­firm­ing they would of­fer the Curepe res­i­dents land de­vel­oped in Fred­er­ick Set­tle­ment, Ca­roni.

The land would be de­duct­ed from their over­all com­pen­sa­tion pack­age, Gon­za­les said.

How­ev­er, if these res­i­dents are evict­ed through the war­rant that land of­fer will no longer be on the ta­ble. “The un­for­tu­nate thing is that now that the min­istry is now seek­ing to in­voke the war­rant or­der to take pos­ses­sion the af­fect­ed res­i­dents may no longer be en­ti­tled to that par­cel of land in Ca­roni, and that’s the un­for­tu­nate part of this,” said Gon­za­les.