The $19 million refurbishment works at the Chatham Youth Development Apprenticeship Centre are now being probed. This from Minister of Sport and Youth Affairs, Phillip Watts.
During a tour of the facility on Saturday, he said the full $19 million allocated to the project has already been paid, yet the project is only 70 per cent complete.
The upgrade Chatham Youth Development Facility, which started in mid-2022, was intended to deliver new dormitories, renovate existing buildings, and add a sick bay, laundromat, and other infrastructure improvements. Minister of Sports and Youth Affairs, Phillip Watts said his Ministry is now reviewing the payment records and progress reports to determine how the funds were spent and why the project remains unfinished.
“I am yet to understand why this project stopped because I don’t think we have any monies owing the contractor, no, no money is outstanding and how long now this project is on halt? A year..over a year this project is on halt and we owe the contractor no money so we need to investigate why the contractor stopped the project”
He said there appeared to be a major gap between the money paid out and the work completed on the site. Minister Watts questioned why construction had come to a halt more than a year ago, emphasizing that the contractor had already received all payments due under the contract.
The Minister said he was also informed that there’s a 10 million dollar variation to the project.
“I have the BOQ in my hand here so normally you would have your consultant come in scope the building and they would get a feedback from the client which is the ministry as to what they want the buildings for, so when they scope the building, to me because its existing buildings they should have scoped the buildings properly but now I’m hearing theres a 10 million dollar variation that we need to understand why and how it came about.”
He shared the way forward.
“We need to meet with the contractor, sit with our project team and do a full audit on the project, do a full scope because I’m looking at the bill of quantities in my hand and we don’t have a full break down for every single block to see what was the measurement on every single block so we need to go through that, we need to do a full audit on this project.”
Member of Parliament for Point Fortin, and Minister in the Ministry of Energy, Ernesto Kesar said the facility has been a critical youth development facility for over 50 years.
“This particular centre would have been integral in developing young people in technical and vocational areas it was a foreground for a lot of development of youths, youth who were – had a little trouble with the law and things like that and it would have turned out hundreds possibly thousands of young people who would have gone on to, some of them end up vice captains of industry they would have worked in the oil and gas field.”
He is hopeful that the facility would be up and running in the shortest possible time.
Minister Watts and his team visited 5 sites on Saturday