Preserve the Chag Convention Centre

THE EDITOR: On an early morning visit to Chaguaramas you can still see and hear howler monkeys. You can enjoy the sunrise while on a hiking trail. You can participate in a range of activities in an absolutely beautiful environment.

Chaguaramas has the potential to become the best eco-friendly business and entertainment space in the region, but successive governments have failed at their attempts to make it an environmentally sustainable area.

If you visit Chaguaramas today, you might be saddened by the dilapidated state of the Chaguaramas Convention Centre where the Chaguaramas Treaty was signed to establish Caricom.

You might be disappointed by the lack of access to several of the beaches and the decrepit state of the Military History and Aviation Museum.

You might feel disillusioned when you observe another slowly deteriorating building with a Ministry of Agriculture, Lands and Fisheries sign.

Governments have presided over the slow deterioration of the convention centre. A building of such significance and heritage should be refurbished, restored, and made into an income-generating space for use by our people.

It comprises 72 hotel-type rooms, a 26,000-square-foot meeting space, a lounge, a lobby bar and a restaurant. The way it is designed and its location make it an ideal venue to house a “model” tourism school.

But instead of making it a model tourism school, on July 19, 2021, the Ministry of Youth Development and National Service issued a news release indicating that “Cabinet approval had been obtained for the refurbishment, repurposing and outfitting of the Chaguaramas Convention Centre into a modern youth development and apprenticeship centre.”

This refurbished facility is intended to be consistent with the current standards of a modern-day residential vocational training institution.

Looking at the building from the outside, there is no evidence that this work has begun while our youths continue to opt for lives of crime. If the plan is to refurbish and repurpose the Chaguaramas Convention Centre, then let’s do it, but it is scandalous for a government to preside over the slow deterioration of such a monumental building.

In a broader context, citizens need to understand the long-term plan for the Chaguaramas peninsula. With every change of administration some “government funder” is given permission to do something against the provisions of “the 1974 Chaguaramas Development Plan which zoned all highland areas in the Chaguaramas Peninsula above the 350 feet contour and the entire area of Point Gourde as a nature reserve.”

Soon after taking office in 2016, a Trinidad Guardian newspaper report quoted the current Minister of Planning and Development as saying that the water park is built "in an area where, according to the law, it should not be." Madam Minister, what have you done about it?

Maybe the time has come for citizens to take action to preserve what is left of the Chaguaramas peninsula. Our country is blessed with multiple beautiful green spaces, but we have also been cursed by having leadership that is either unwilling or unable to optimise the use of those spaces in a manner that is sustainable.

Taking action to preserve our green spaces is a responsibility that falls on the current generation. Let’s do better!

DENNISE DEMMING

Diego Martin