The Government has agreed to set up a Priority Portal Desk to address bottlenecks in approval processes for large investment projects.
Minister of Planning, Economic Affairs and Development, Dr. Kennedy Swaratsingh, made the announcement at the launch of the Revitalisation Blueprint of Trinidad and Tobago. He said the mandate came from Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar.
“What the Cabinet has approved is that with planning and EMA we now set up a priority process desk where when these applications of a certain size, over 50 million, come into that desk, it will be given urgent attention and care for an approval process expanding or spanning no more than 90 days. We are turning bureaucracy into opportunity. Red carpet and red tape into red carpet.”
Minister Swaratsingh explained that there are several cases where persons have become frustrated over the number of years it takes to get approval for significant projects.
He said: “The EMA has said to me that in the last five years, $34 billion of potential projects sat in their coffers. Not only are they awaiting feedback for some of these projects, but people have gotten so fed up that they just walked away from them. In fact, over $1 billion of those was just taken out of the system altogether. These are some of the things that we have had to grapple with.”