Man­hole cov­ers on pave­ments are be­ing stolen like hot hops around To­ba­go, says sec­re­tary of Pub­lic Util­i­ties and In­fra­struc­ture in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly God­win Adams. Adams said so on Wednes­day, dur­ing the as­sem­bly's post ex­ec­u­tive news coun­cil. He said as soon as the cov­ers were put down they dis­ap­pear overnight, es­pe­cial­ly in ar­eas in­fre­quent­ly used at night. "I am de­pressed over that...Af­ter we spent thou­sands of dol­lars to man­u­fac­ture these cov­ers, in the dead of night peo­ple have been steal­ing them, maybe to sell as scrap," he said.

The as­sem­bly is now con­struct­ing pave­ments in the vicin­i­ty of schools to en­sure the safe­ty of pedes­tri­ans, es­pe­cial­ly chil­dren. Adams al­so not­ed that the as­sem­bly would soon launch a se­ries of projects man­aged by MTS av­er­ag­ing be­tween $5 mil­lion and $15 mil­lion over the next cou­ple months. These in­clud­ed mi­ni malls at Calder Hall with ten cu­bi­cles, Sig­nal Hill with 14 and Ad­ven­ture with 16. He said vil­lagers would be giv­en first pref­er­ence to op­er­ate busi­ness­es in the malls. He said com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres would be con­struct­ed at Bet­sy's Hope, Spey­side and Low­lands.

Al­so in the pipeline is the re­sump­tion of work on the new Scar­bor­ough Li­brary and con­struc­tion of the Mt Pleas­ant RC School. He said ten­ders were be­ing eval­u­at­ed by the Cen­tral Ten­ders Board. Adams said projects were now be­ing un­der­tak­en as a re­sult of the dam­age caused by Hur­ri­cane Tomas last year.