Clydeen Mc Don­ald

Frus­trat­ed with the fail­ure to com­plete work at the Diego Mar­tin Recre­ation ground, irate res­i­dents from the area will stage a protest out­side the of­fices of the Sports Com­pa­ny of T&T (SPORTT) and the Min­istry of Sport and Youth Af­fairs (MSYA) to­day, to de­mand ac­tion be tak­en to com­plete the venue.

This was the de­ci­sion which mem­bers of the new­ly formed Sa­van­nah Ac­tion Group (SAG) took in a meet­ing at on Sun­day at the Mer­ry­tones Pan Yard. Ac­cord­ing to Patrick Ram­per­sad, pres­i­dent of the or­ga­ni­za­tion, a let­ter was sent to SPORTT ask­ing for a meet­ing to dis­cuss the sit­u­a­tion but no re­sponse was re­ceived. This has forced res­i­dents to take pub­lic ac­tion to bring a res­o­lu­tion to the mat­ter.

Ram­per­sad said: "It has been over two and a half years we have been wait­ing to have this work com­plet­ed. The res­i­dents are not pleased and we re­al­ly think it is time we do some­thing dif­fer­ent to get some ac­tion on the mat­ter. A protest seems to be the best ac­tion." Ram­per­sad said the let­ter has been copied to MP for the area, Colm Im­bert, and sports min­is­ter, Gary Hunt. "We are hop­ing to get word from them as to when they would meet with us." The area's top crick­et team Ce­ram­ic Mer­ry­boys who cam­paigns in the na­tion­al league is among the groups af­fect­ed. Their play­ers have been us­ing fa­cil­i­ties at St. Mary's Col­lege to train for the past two years.

The club has al­so rent­ed the in­door fa­cil­i­ties at the Queen's Park Oval for prac­tice. Ram­per­sad said: "It has been cost­ing us a lot over the past two and a half years, the youths of the area have been in­volved in all types of an­ti­so­cial be­hav­iour re­sult­ing in a num­ber of crime re­lat­ed ac­tiv­i­ty in our com­mu­ni­ty. We need to get this fa­cil­i­ty com­plet­ed so that the youths can en­gage in mean­ing­ful ac­tiv­i­ty."