The Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try has hit back at con­cerns raised by new­ly elect­ed Chief Sec­re­tary of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Far­ley Au­gus­tine about the de­vel­op­ment of a ho­tel prop­er­ty at Rocky Point.

Au­gus­tine, in the Thurs­day Busi­ness Guardian ar­ti­cle “Far­ley: PNM Left us a bed of thorns” the PDP Deputy po­lit­i­cal leader ques­tioned the De­vel­op­ment of a First Class Ho­tel and Prop­er­ty De­vel­op­ment at Rocky Point with what he be­lieved “was a lack of in­volve­ment of the THA in dri­ving the project.”

The Min­istry in a re­lease on Thurs­day said “The To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly has been an in­te­gral play­er in the de­vel­op­ment of this project since its in­cep­tion. Specif­i­cal­ly, in April 2021, Cab­i­net es­tab­lished an Eval­u­a­tion Com­mit­tee to re­view Ex­pres­sions of In­ter­est (EOIs) for the de­vel­op­ment of a First Class Ho­tel and Prop­er­ty De­vel­op­ment at Rocky Point which in­clud­ed a se­nior rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the THA. “

The Min­istry ex­plained the Eval­u­a­tion Com­mit­tee met dur­ing the pe­ri­od April-Au­gust 2021 to eval­u­ate both Ex­pres­sions of In­ter­est and sub­se­quent­ly, Re­quest for Pro­pos­als (RF­Ps) from short­list­ed en­ti­ties.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Trade the Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the THA played a crit­i­cal role dur­ing the eval­u­a­tion process to en­sure that pro­pos­als were eval­u­at­ed based on ro­bust eval­u­a­tion cri­te­ria which in­ter alia in­clud­ed a Lo­cal Ben­e­fits Plan and an En­vi­ron­men­tal Preser­va­tion Plan to en­sure that the de­vel­op­ment in­te­grates with the sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties and con­sid­ered the con­ser­va­tion of the en­vi­ron­ment and nat­ur­al beau­ty of the Rocky Point Bay.”

The re­lease closed by stat­ing the po­ten­tial ben­e­fits of the project, “The pro­posed de­vel­op­ment of this 200-room Mar­riott-brand­ed ho­tel will pro­pel To­ba­go as a front run­ner in the com­pet­i­tive Caribbean tourism en­vi­ron­ment and will au­gur well for the fu­ture of tourism for the is­land. The se­lect­ed in­vestor has com­mit­ted to in­vest­ing TT$496 Mil­lion and when com­plet­ed, the Re­sort will em­ploy over 221 per­sons, most­ly from To­ba­go. It is es­ti­mat­ed that ap­prox­i­mate­ly 750 per­sons will be em­ployed dur­ing the con­struc­tion phase of the project. The mul­ti­pli­er ef­fect from this project both dur­ing con­struc­tion and op­er­a­tion will be sig­nif­i­cant for the is­land of To­ba­go and by ex­ten­sion Trinidad. “