TriniRealty.com

Trade Minister Mariano Browne hit back at critics of Government spending by saying the total cost of four of their maligned construction mega-projects and of hosting two world summits was just $8 billion. He spoke on Friday night at Exodus Panyard in Tunapuna at the launch of the re-election campaign of the ruling PNM’s former Tunapuna MP, Esther Le Gendre.

Browne said the National Academy for the Performing Arts (NAPA), Waterfront Project, Government Campus, Ministry of Legal Affairs Towers and the two summits (Summit of the Americas and the Commonwealth Meeting) had between 2005 and 2010 cost some $8 billion.

Construction of two new dialysis centres will begin by August and will be completed within 18 months, Health Minister Jerry Narace said yesterday. Speaking during the signing ceremony for the establishment of the centres, at the ministry’s head office, Park Street, Port-of-Spain, Narace said the cost to design and build the centres would be $108 million per year.

A contract for the centres was signed between the North Central Regional Health Authority and British-based company Fresenius Medical Care Holdings Limited. Fresenius is the largest provider of products and services for individuals undergoing dialysis because of chronic kidney failure. Narace said the centres would be constructed at the Eric Williams’ Medical Science Complex and the San Fernando General Hospital.

Land availability and not politics dictates the locations of affordable housing, chairman of the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) Jearlean John said Friday, as she dismissed any allegations of ’voter padding’ through that agency. John was responding to murmurs from some quarters that the Government uses housing schemes built by the HDC to pour its supporters into marginal constituencies-particularly in the lead-up to a general election.

She has countered that while the HDC continues to hand over new homes on a daily basis, it definitely has nothing to do with the next national polls, scheduled for May 24. ’There is no sinister objective in the HDC’s distribution of houses,’ John said in a telephone interview Friday.