KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

With near­ly all of a $19 mil­lion con­tract al­ready paid to a con­trac­tor for the re­fur­bish­ment of the Chatham Youth De­vel­op­ment Ap­pren­tice­ship Cen­tre, Sports and Youth Af­fairs Min­is­ter Phillip Watts is now ques­tion­ing where the mon­ey went, giv­en that the project is on­ly 70 per cent com­plete.

The up­grade, which be­gan in mid-2022, in­clud­ed the con­struc­tion of new dor­mi­to­ries, the re­fur­bish­ment of ex­ist­ing build­ings, and the ad­di­tion of a sick bay, laun­dro­mat, and gen­er­al in­fra­struc­ture im­prove­ments.

The Na­tion­al Main­te­nance Train­ing and Se­cu­ri­ty Com­pa­ny Ltd (NMTS) was award­ed the project man­age­ment con­tract, and the work was ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed with­in ten months. How­ev­er, two years lat­er, the com­pound re­mains a con­struc­tion site.

Dur­ing a site vis­it yes­ter­day, Watts toured the fa­cil­i­ty with Point Fortin MP Ernesto Ke­sar, of­fi­cials from the Min­istry of Sports and Youth De­vel­op­ment, NMTS, and a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the con­trac­tor, Con­struc­tion Ser­vices and Sup­plies Ltd.

While there were vis­i­ble signs of tiling, paint­ing, and roof­ing, the com­pound was over­grown with bush­es, strewn with an­i­mal drop­pings, and plagued by in­com­plete fit­tings and ex­posed elec­tri­cal work.

“What you all are wit­ness­ing here is that this project is nowhere close to com­ple­tion,” Watts told re­porters.

“The con­trac­tor here re­ceived al­most 100 per cent pay­ment, and I am al­so see­ing the project has a $10 mil­lion vari­a­tion, so we need to look in­to this project.”

He said there ap­peared to be a sig­nif­i­cant dis­crep­an­cy be­tween the funds dis­bursed and the ac­tu­al work de­liv­ered. Watts ques­tioned why the project had stalled over a year ago and in­sist­ed there were no out­stand­ing pay­ments owed to the con­trac­tor.

While ac­knowl­edg­ing the $10 mil­lion vari­a­tion, he said many of the build­ings were ex­ist­ing struc­tures and did not war­rant such high ad­di­tion­al costs. He added that he had not re­ceived a de­tailed break­down of the bill of quan­ti­ties, which would show how funds were al­lo­cat­ed.

The min­is­ter said he plans to meet with the min­istry’s project team and the con­trac­tor to au­dit the project and de­ter­mine the next steps.

As part of a broad­er tour to as­sess readi­ness at var­i­ous youth fa­cil­i­ties, Watts said he hopes to in­te­grate ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence in­to train­ing at the Chatham cen­tre, tai­lor­ing its pro­grammes to bet­ter serve young peo­ple in the area.

Ke­sar al­so ex­pressed dis­ap­point­ment at the fa­cil­i­ty’s con­di­tion, not­ing that the cen­tre had pro­duced thou­sands of skilled trades­men over the years who went on to work in in­dus­tries across Point Fortin, Point Lisas, the pub­lic sec­tor, and na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices.

Once op­er­a­tional again, Ke­sar be­lieves the cen­tre can trans­form the lives of a new gen­er­a­tion of youth, in­clud­ing those fac­ing be­hav­iour­al chal­lenges in schools.

The CSSL rep­re­sen­ta­tive on site de­clined to com­ment.

Asked about con­tract work­ers re­port­ed­ly be­ing ter­mi­nat­ed at the min­istry, Watts clar­i­fied that no one was fired, but some con­tracts had ex­pired and not been re­newed. He said the min­istry was re­view­ing po­si­tions where there was cur­rent­ly no work as­signed.