Piles of road paving material now sit in the Queen’s Park Savannah opposite the President’s House. Given the material, what is being staged here is not temporary flooring. It is the material for a permanent road.
What makes this more troubling is what’s missing. Any legitimate construction site of this scale would ordinarily carry a notice board — the contractor, the commissioning agency, the scope and duration of works. I have not seen this here. No signage identifying who is doing this work, on whose authority, or why. Citizens are left to guess who is paving a piece of the Savannah and on what basis.
We have been here before, and the precedent should worry us. In 1999, then-Minister of Works Carlos John admitted to paving a part of the Savannah so that soldiers marching in the Independence Day parade would not have to walk through mud. The job was never put out for tender, and the cost was never disclosed to the public. The late environmentalist and former minister Eden Shand staged a one-man protest against it — and was nearly buried in gravel for his trouble. That paving still scars the Savannah today. A quarter-century later, we are watching the same justification, the same silence, and the same disregard for process play out again on the same ground.
I ask directly: who authorized this paving, under what statutory approval, and why is there no notice on site identifying the responsible party? If this work is lawful, there should be nothing to hide. If it isn’t, citizens deserve to know that too.
Our governments have allowed the gradual encroachment on the lungs of the Queen’s Park Savannah and Port of Spain. Barbados has its Garrison Savannah. London has Hyde Park. New York has Central Park. If we cannot say the same of our own Savannah a generation from now, it will not be because no one warned us. I am calling on the relevant authorities — Town and Country Planning, the National Trust, and whichever body commissioned this work — to halt further paving, post proper notice, and issue a public accounting within the week, before the last patch of grass on that stretch disappears for good.
Dennise Demming 