To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Sec­re­tary for In­fra­struc­ture, Quar­ries and Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment, Trevor James, says the car­go is­sues on the seabridge have not yet af­fect­ed ma­jor projects on the is­land.

How­ev­er, James, in a phone in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, hint­ed to signs of trou­ble ahead, as hard­ware stores across the is­land are out ce­ment, steel, sand and blocks.

He pre­dict­ed that the projects un­der the THA will start ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the reper­cus­sions of the seabridge is­sues start­ing from next week, with the Stud­ley Park En­ter­prise Lim­it­ed (SPELL) be­ing one of the first af­fect­ed.

“As far as SPELL goes, what the chair­man has said to me is that by next week, ce­ment will be­come a chal­lenge. But we don’t have a re­al chal­lenge here on the is­land that we can iden­ti­fy on the THA side with re­gard to con­struc­tion projects. Not much con­struc­tion projects are go­ing on on our side ei­ther, so we don’t have a re­al chal­lenge yet,” he said.

“I know the hard­ware is out of ce­ment but at SPELL we buy ce­ment and they come by barge. The im­pact of that will hit the con­struc­tion sec­tor by next week.”

How­ev­er, he de­scribed the cur­rent car­go is­sue as an­oth­er at­tempt by Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment to un­der­mine To­ba­go.

“We have al­lowed a struc­ture in a coun­try to ex­ist where one is­land de­pends sole­ly on the oth­er is­land for its pro­vi­sion. As a gov­ern­ment, we took a wil­ful de­ci­sion not to op­er­ate un­der this and that wil­ful de­ci­sion has us where we are to­day. When the PNM came in­to of­fice in 2015 and re­fused to ex­tend the con­tract for the ex­ist­ing ves­sel, had To­bag­o­ni­ans us­ing barge for a long time and then pro­ceed­ed to lease a 38-year-old ves­sel. You can­not plan a coun­try like that. That makes the case, again, for To­ba­go to de­vel­op the in­fra­struc­ture for di­rect im­por­ta­tion.”

Mean­while, for­mer Truck­ers and Traders As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Ho­race Ameade said the cur­rent sce­nario was wait­ing to hap­pen.

“From 2011 to 2013, both the Truck­ers and To­ba­go Cham­ber met with the port and gave them sug­ges­tions of the ves­sel that we need. Af­ter that, when this Gov­ern­ment came in­to pow­er, we met with Ned­co (Na­tion­al En­tre­pre­neur­ship De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny) and gave them all the doc­u­ments that we had about the ves­sel that we think they should be look­ing for so they can cus­tom build one.

“Be­tween then and now noth­ing has been done. So, it was a cri­sis wait­ing to hap­pen. It hap­pen so and we like to re­act, we don’t like to put things in place and do things be­fore the is­sue hap­pens. We op­er­ate in a cri­sis mode.”