CONSTRUCTION VS DESTRUCTION: COSTS VS BENEFITS The cost of doing business or for that matter the cost of anything in Trinidad is increasing by obscene amounts. And nobody seems to care. Million dollar amounts are routinely bandied around for the simplest of things or service. 34 million to teach a few dropouts for two years, the equivalent of the salaries of 2000 teachers. Nobody thinks twice. Hundreds of millions to outfit a few thousand of feet of building space. Nobody seems concerned. The big problem is the fact there is just too much money in Trinidad and Tobago. If we had a lot less to spend we would have a lot less to waste. The billion is the new million. Costs are being quoted in billions now and it seems that people think that a billion is two million, because when the term billion is used, nobody seems to be moved. For your information a billion dollars is a thousand million dollars. Thats a lot of greenbacks. When Dr. Kublalsingh conducted his first hunger strike in opposition to the government spending billions to construct a highway through an established wetland, a lot of people condemned him for trying to stop progress. Nobody seemed to consider that the highway was a complete waste of money because it cost at least 5 to 10 times what it should cost and what a similar highway in this region should cost. The Highway 2000 in Jamaica, one leg of which was recently opened, is over 230 kilometres long. The highway from San Fernando to Point Fortin is approximately 30. The cost of the highway 2000 in Jamaica is around 850 million US dollars. The cost of the 30 odd kilometre highway in Trinidad is estimated at 1.5 billion US dollars and counting. So for a highway of more than seven times the length of the Trinidad highway the Jamaican highway cost about half what it cost in Trinidad. And they do not have a pitch lake. Thats 14 times as much, yet nobody complains about that. Most are condemning Dr. Kublalsingh as a madman bent on suppressing progress. The fact that the highway contract was given out without tender and that its cost is corruptly exorbitant is nobodys business. Those who are standing for the Debe to Mon Desir leg of the highway to be built, are those who will benefit from the money they will be paid for relocation. They will not be staying to ketch hell when the highway is built. Two and a half billion dollars has been earmarked for relocation expenses according to the then Works Minister, when the highway cost was announced. Thats an average of 10 million per household, give or take. Since some are being offered 50,000 to 100,000 for their properties, where is the rest of the money going? With secret and independent assessment of property values, there is bound to be corruption going on. Dr. Kublalsingh was protesting the wrong thing. Nobody in Trinidad cares about the environment, or at least it seems that not too many care, so the goodly doctor who put his life on the line only had a handful of supporters. But would the support have been any better if everyone understood what the cost of the highway actually means in terms of its value compared to its benefits? Even now the government is bent on pushing forward with the controversial leg of the highway, cutting across sensitive ecological areas, displacing settled families, disrupting communities and demolishing schools and mosques in the process, while spending exorbitant sums on what could probably be described as a highway to nowhere. Even in the face of a self commissioned investigation of the rationale for the leg of the highway that turned up negative, the government is still ignoring its own reports and pushing forward with the obscene waste of taxpayers money, with very little benefit to the residents that are going to be affected by the construction of the highway. Costs should always be balanced by benefits. In Jamaica the ratio of cost to benefit varies between 1.2 and 1.7, meaning that the benefits actually exceed the costs by at least an average of 50%. In Trinidad a cost benefit survey has not even been done.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 16:28:56 +0000
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