RYAN BA­CHOO

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

It’s been a busy year so far for Port-of-Spain. The colour of Car­ni­val re­turned to the streets in Feb­ru­ary af­ter the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, and the city has host­ed three ma­jor Caribbean con­fer­ences since April. But the tow­ers that dot the sky­line from St Vin­cent Street go­ing fur­ther west tell the sto­ry of a city with two sides to the same coin. East Port-of-Spain and the pover­ty and trou­bles it car­ries is very much an in­te­gral part of the tale of this town.

As cap­i­tal city, Port-of-Spain has its chal­lenges of flood­ing, crime, traf­fic, park­ing, and home­less­ness. To some, the city col­laps­es un­der the weight of ex­pec­ta­tion. Yet, it re­mains an im­por­tant part of life for those who live in it and those who use it dai­ly.

Sir Derek Wal­cott, the 1992 No­bel Lau­re­ate, an in in­ter­view with Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist Bill Moy­ers, once de­scribed Port-of-Spain as “one of the most in­ter­est­ing cities in the world.” In that in­ter­view, he said: “In one city of Port-of-Spain, which is a cliché, every cul­ture and every con­ti­nent of the world is rep­re­sent­ed in that one city, and not just as a sort of de­tri­tus of slav­ery or in­den­ture, [it is] ac­tive­ly rep­re­sent­ed by the Hin­du re­li­gion, by the Mus­lim re­li­gion, by Chi­nese, In­di­an, Syr­i­an, Lebanese, white, black, it’s all there in a very small area of one of the cap­i­tal places in the Caribbean. The day-to-day ex­pe­ri­ence of that has be­come so ha­bit­u­al that no­body makes dis­tinc­tions.”

Yet, Port-of-Spain is much more than the 45,000 peo­ple who re­side there. Ac­cord­ing May­or Joel Mar­tinez, 200,000 peo­ple come to the city every day from dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try, most of them to work. De­pend­ing on what part of the cap­i­tal you work, your ex­pe­ri­ence will be dif­fer­ent. Down­town presents the chal­lenge of home­less­ness, while some streets flood. Giv­en that wreck­ing has re­mained on the shelf since the start of the pan­dem­ic, the city is con­gest­ed with cars parked on both sides of the streets.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, Port-of-Spain has been a PNM strong­hold. It com­pris­es 12 dis­tricts ex­tend­ing from Bel­mont East to St Ann’s Riv­er South and Wood­brook. The rul­ing par­ty won all 12 seats in the 2019 Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tion (LGE). Be­fore that, in the pre­vi­ous two LGE’s in 2016 and 2013, it was a com­plete sweep for the PNM.

Yet, the cap­i­tal city strug­gles to ex­cite vot­ers for the LGE. There were 37,770 el­i­gi­ble vot­ers in Port-of-Spain for the 2019 LGE but on­ly 9,214 vot­ed. The na­tion­al av­er­age vot­er turnout for the elec­tion was 35 per cent. Port-of-Spain had a vot­er turnout of 24.4 per cent.

Reg­u­lar in­jec­tion of mil­lions of dol­lars keep the city afloat but there are lin­ger­ing is­sues plagu­ing the cap­i­tal. In 2022, gov­ern­ment al­lo­cat­ed close to $233 mil­lion to the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion. The year be­fore, the city was al­lo­cat­ed al­most $10 mil­lion less than that.

In 2020, gov­ern­ment al­lo­cat­ed just over $228 mil­lion while in 2019 the cap­i­tal city re­ceived over $242 mil­lion. Ac­cord­ing to bud­get doc­u­ments, the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion had $456.9 mil­lion in re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture in fis­cal 2022 and 2023. Port-of-Spain has the largest bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion of re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture per res­i­dent—with a 2023 bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion of $6,046 per res­i­dent. The sec­ond high­est is Pt Fortin Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion with a bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion of $3,946 per res­i­dent.

Home­less­ness

Down­town Port-of-Spain re­mains a hive for the home­less. It is one of the long-stand­ing is­sues in the city. In ad­di­tion to af­fect­ing how vis­i­tors walk on the side­walks, the sight of home­less peo­ple does lit­tle for the city’s aes­thet­ics. Sev­er­al may­ors have failed to have any re­al im­pact on the is­sue.

Mar­tinez ad­mit­ted: “It has been tremen­dous­ly more dif­fi­cult than I thought.”

To tack­le the prob­lem, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced at a po­lit­i­cal ral­ly in St James on June 29 that in a few weeks Gov­ern­ment will turn the sod for con­struc­tion of an as­sess­ment cen­tre at the old foundry site which is meant to pro­vide hous­ing to home­less peo­ple who live on the streets of the city.

The Prime Min­is­ter said: “Af­ter that is built and is avail­able, we will put the law in the Par­lia­ment and no per­son will be al­lowed to lie on the street and live on the street.”

The Sun­day Guardian vis­it­ed sev­er­al home­less peo­ple who live in the city to get their thoughts on this plan. Nor­bert Cu­pid, who has been liv­ing on the streets for the last ten months, said while he will sup­port the as­sess­ment cen­tre, home­less peo­ple have se­ri­ous con­cerns about abuse.

“The gov­ern­ment, the op­po­si­tion and the church ain’t putting any­thing in place to pro­vide for home­less peo­ple and then you want to run them away and ad­van­tage them in many ways. You want to say they are a men­tal case from Sal­va­tion Army, men­tal case from St Ann’s, or men­tal case from the hos­pi­tal and they want the doc­tors to im­ply that they are drunk or sober and take abuse even though you put them in a home,” he said.

May­or Mar­tinez said he tried get­ting dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers to­geth­er to deal with the is­sue but it nev­er worked out.

“One of the things I tried to ar­tic­u­late was how can we get the po­lice, the men­tal health di­vi­sion and the cit­i­zens to all be on the same page to­geth­er with the NGOs and the au­thor­i­ties to be able to put it all to­geth­er, but be­cause we all op­er­ate in si­los, every­body has a dif­fer­ent opin­ion on things and every­thing hap­pened dif­fer­ent­ly,” he said.

As talk of re­vi­tal­is­ing the city comes up once more, Mar­tinez in­sist­ed that “home­less­ness has no place there.”

Crime

Along Fred­er­ick Street, ven­dors and passers-by list crime and flood­ing as their two biggest con­cerns.

On a hot day in the city, wa­ter ven­dors are on every cor­ner push­ing their trol­lies back and forth, en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to buy. Shu­nade Hamil­ton and Cean­na Cyrille pa­tro­n­ise one of the ven­dors at the bot­tom of Fred­er­ick Street. The two young women are from Guyana but are study­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean. There are many like them who con­tribute to the di­ver­si­ty of the city.

“When we came, they told us do not go out on our own es­pe­cial­ly that we are for­eign stu­dents and the crime rate here in Trinidad is very high so this can be an is­sue es­pe­cial­ly for tourism in terms of tourists,” Cyrille said.

That con­cern was am­pli­fied last Oc­to­ber when the US State De­part­ment is­sued a strict warn­ing to Amer­i­cans not to trav­el in Port-of-Spain be­cause of crime, ter­ror­ism and kid­nap­ping.

Flood­ing

Head­ed fur­ther east, Char­lotte Street ven­dors com­pete to be heard as they sell their goods at the side of the road. It’s a hus­tle for these ven­dors and few have time to do any­thing but at­tract cus­tomers.

One ven­dor com­ment­ed: “Just a lit­tle driz­zle floods Char­lotte Street and no­body is do­ing any­thing about it. Wa­ter just comes and floods the place and go down but no­body is do­ing any­thing about it. Who are you go­ing to talk to? No­body comes around to find out.”

At the PNM’s po­lit­i­cal meet­ing in St James, the Prime Min­is­ter said he had in­struct­ed this coun­try’s of­fi­cer at the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) to open dis­cus­sions for a loan specif­i­cal­ly to deal with the drainage is­sue in Port-of-Spain.

De­plorable roads

Port-of-Spain’s pot­hole prob­lems lie deep be­neath the sur­face of what dri­vers see. The ma­jor­i­ty of is­sues are due to dam­aged wa­ter and sew­er lines which re­quire the roads be dug up by the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA). Mar­tinez said he’s been sub­ject­ed to abuse about the state of roads in the city. He said now that the Sec­ondary Roads Com­pa­ny is tasked with those re­pairs, his of­fice has sub­mit­ted a list and is hop­ing Port-of-Spain gets fair treat­ment in road re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion.

Park­ing in Port-of-Spain

If roads in the city are a chal­lenge for dri­vers to nav­i­gate, the park­ing sit­u­a­tion makes it worse. With no wreck­ing in ef­fect, cars are parked on both sides of streets adding to the con­ges­tion.

Mar­tinez has been ad­vo­cat­ing for the re­sump­tion of wreck­ing. How­ev­er, the au­thor­i­ty to wreck in the city lies with the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice. The may­or said up to last week he had a con­ver­sa­tion with Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher about re­sum­ing wreck­ing.

“We can give peo­ple tick­ets, we can find oth­er so­lu­tions if you don’t want to wreck, but I think for the time be­ing we need to re-em­ploy the wreck­ing so we can bring some law and or­der back in­to the city,” he said.

In re­spond­ing to crit­ics who say there are not enough park­ing spaces to ac­com­mo­date the num­ber of peo­ple work­ing in the city, the may­or said: “I would think that if you run a busi­ness in the city of Port-of-Spain and you are ben­e­fit­ting from that busi­ness and you have ded­i­cat­ed staff that are trav­el­ing from all parts of Trinidad in­to the city that you can make arrange­ments to as­sist your staffing and al­low them to do so.”

May­or Mar­tinez feels lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­form can go a long way in fix­ing some of the prob­lems the cap­i­tal city faces by bring­ing the may­or, al­der­men and coun­cil­lors clos­er to­geth­er to work for the bet­ter­ment of Port-of-Spain.

The can­di­dates

The UNC will field can­di­dates for six of the 12 dis­tricts in the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion. It’s a place where they have large­ly strug­gled to find suc­cess.

Dar­ren Gar­ner will lead the op­po­si­tion’s charge in the city hop­ing to rep­re­sent North­ern Port-of-Spain. With crime a ma­jor con­cern, he said the UNC will bring back Com­mu­ni­ty Com­fort Pa­trols to deal with crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

“We see a lot of school chil­dren in­volved in a lot of il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ties be­ing an eye­sore in the city. We want to have the mu­nic­i­pal po­lice work in tan­dem with the schools to make the law-abid­ing cit­i­zens who have chil­dren go­ing to these schools to have them feel com­fort­able that their chil­dren are safe,” he said.

Gar­ner will be up against Coun­cil­lor Abena Hart­ley, the in­cum­bent, who is aim­ing to re­turn for the third time. North­ern Port-of-Spain en­com­pass­es a di­verse de­mo­graph­ic, in­clud­ing res­i­dents of St Clair, New­town, up­town and Char­ford Courts.

While the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) block doesn’t fall un­der her re­mit, Hart­ley says she still rep­re­sents res­i­dents of Char­ford Courts and it is an on­go­ing ef­fort to bring their liv­ing con­di­tions up to stan­dard. As she seeks an­oth­er term, her goal is to hold to ac­count the Chief Ac­count­ing Of­fi­cer and the CEO to en­sure the var­i­ous di­vi­sions un­der­stand that their role and func­tion in main­tain­ing in­fra­struc­ture and dri­ving de­vel­op­ment.

A com­mon con­cern for all the can­di­dates in Port-of-Spain is the lev­el of noise on Ari­api­ta Av­enue and St Clair where par­ties are fre­quent.

Hart­ley said: “I re­al­ly think at this point, and I’m go­ing to be a lit­tle bold­faced and brave in say­ing that, we have to find the bal­ance and the bal­ance has to come in the form of whether we reg­u­larise open­ing and clos­ing times.”

She said a pro­pos­al is be­fore the City Cor­po­ra­tion to in­volve all par­ties in the de­ci­sion-mak­ing process be­fore li­cens­es are grant­ed for par­ties.