The East Port of Spain Development Company is continuing its programme to instal flush toilets and indoor showers in homes in East Port of Spain, managing director Debra Thomas-Austin said at a virtual meeting with Parliament’s Public Accounts Enterprises Committee on Wednesday.
She explained that the programme has slowed during the pandemic, but noted that more than 400 households have been converted since 2013.
When former mayor Louis Lee Sing campaigned in local government elections in 2019, he claimed that there were still more than 3,000 latrine pits in the capital city. In the next phase of the programme, 45 homes are scheduled for replacement.
East Port of Spain is a densely populated, largely lower-income neighbourhood and the removal of latrines should have begun long before 2013.
A plan to pedestrianise Ariapita Avenue in March 2021 was largely derailed by covid19 restrictions.
Unfulfilled plans to improve Lapeyrouse Cemetery and tap its value as a historical site also date back to Mr Lee Sing's tenure as mayor.
The only consistency is a history of promising talk followed by inadequate action.
Anyone living in Port of Spain is doing so in defiance of the deterioration of the city centre, so proposed changes must be positive and then put into action.
After a presentation at a forum on urban development at the Hyatt Regency in December 2020, the Prime Minister outlined an initiative drawn from 16 proposals, some decades old, for the development of the city in general and the long-neglected East Port of Spain area specifically. On the table then were high-rise apartments, a waterfront park and tramcars.
Forward-looking architects and city planners have long pressed for a reconsideration of the city, bridging its original colonial layout and modern use, and some incorporated elements that are still unrealised, and still being proposed.
The late architects John Newel Lewis and Roger Turton, among others, offered bold reconsiderations of the city in the 1980s and a recent book on the city by architect Brian Lewis examined the city's current architecture and design.
Before big plans are considered, dozens of smaller initiatives are desperately needed.
Port of Spain has been plagued for years, and especially since the start of the pandemic, by the store closures big and small businesses under covid19 restrictions and the reluctance of shoppers to go into the decaying downtown area. Examples of notable architecture are visibly collapsing or being demolished; the issues of homeless people is arbitrarily, sporadically remembered; and parking enforcement is abysmal.
This isn't just a problem for the government. The Downtown Owners and Merchants Association (DOMA) needs to step up with plans and projects, some of them in partnership with the city corporation, to make the country’s capital viable again.
It's time for action on small ideas –at first – that can be implemented immediately to change the quality of experience in a city that's oppressive or at best unattractive by day and danger
