Beckles to probe $6M works to CoP’s official home

An­na-Lisa Paul

Se­nior Re­porter

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Op­po­si­tion Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les has vowed to car­ry out her own in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the lev­el of de­te­ri­o­ra­tion that has ren­dered the of­fi­cial res­i­dence of the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (CoP) at the Po­lice Acad­e­my in St James un­in­hab­it­able.

In­di­cat­ing this as she was ques­tioned by re­porters dur­ing a wa­ter protest at Mal­abar South yes­ter­day, she raised a few con­cerns about what had been re­vealed in Par­lia­ment ear­li­er in the week.

Re­fer­ring to claims by Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der that the more than 200-year-old res­i­dence was mouldy and that ex­ter­nal up­grades to the pool and roof as well as the elec­tri­cal and plumb­ing, were re­quired, she said, “What we’d want to know is what is the ex­ist­ing val­ue of the prop­er­ty.”

The prop­er­ty is list­ed un­der the Na­tion­al Trust.

She said, “We will be fil­ing some ques­tions so we could know, be­cause $6 mil­lion, of course, to up­grade, is a sub­stan­tial amount of mon­ey.”

How­ev­er, she went on, “If you think about do­ing a con­struc­tion, yes, in to­day’s world, con­struc­tion is very ex­pen­sive.”

“But they will have to give us the scope of works and tell us ex­act­ly what that $6 mil­lion will do.”

Beck­les in­di­cat­ed, “I will be go­ing to do my vis­it to get some more par­tic­u­lars on it.”Mean­while, as the de­bate con­tin­ues re­gard­ing the bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion to re­pair and re­fur­bish the 202-year-old prop­er­ty at Samaan Dri­ve in St James – for­mer com­mis­sion­er of po­lice Stephen Williams chal­lenged his suc­ces­sor, Gary Grif­fith, to stop spread­ing what he called half-truths.

In­stead, Williams ac­cused Grif­fith of con­tribut­ing to the cur­rent lev­el of de­te­ri­o­ra­tion at the res­i­dence.

De­nounc­ing claims by Grif­fith that no one had oc­cu­pied the premis­es for 21 years, Williams said sev­er­al CoPs had lived in-res­i­dence for vary­ing pe­ri­ods.

Be­sides Williams, he said for­mer CoPs who oc­cu­pied the prop­er­ty in­clud­ed Trevor Paul; James Philbert; Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob; and Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher.

Ju­nior Ben­jamin con­tin­ued to live at his per­son­al res­i­dence dur­ing his brief stint as CoP, while Dwayne Gibbs oc­cu­pied an apart­ment at Flagstaff in St James for his two-year tenure as Williams ad­mit­ted, the house had not been fit for oc­cu­pa­tion when he as­sumed of­fice.

Look­ing at what is re­quired to pre­serve the prop­er­ty, Williams said, “It is an old build­ing and what has hap­pened over the years is that it re­quires con­sis­tent main­te­nance.”

“You can­not lapse in the con­text of main­tain­ing a build­ing of that kind of age.”

An­gered by what he claimed were false ut­ter­ances and bla­tant mis­lead­ing state­ments by Grif­fith, Williams said that noth­ing was done to im­prove/re­pair the res­i­dence while Gibbs held the post of CoP – and that he moved to change the sta­tus quo when he took of­fice.

In­di­cat­ing small sums were al­lo­cat­ed for im­prove­ment works in each fis­cal pe­ri­od, Williams said Ude­cott had done an as­sess­ment well in ex­cess of $10 mil­lion at that time – but no sub­stan­tial sum had ever been al­lo­cat­ed for restora­tion of the res­i­dence.

Hav­ing held the post of CoP from Au­gust 2012 to Au­gust 2018, Williams said he opt­ed to utilise the small sums al­lo­cat­ed to car­ry out what­ev­er works could have been ef­fect­ed in the preser­va­tion of the prop­er­ty year­ly and pre­vent con­tin­ued de­te­ri­o­ra­tion.

Williams al­so took Grif­fith to task for say­ing, by his own ad­mis­sion, that he had opt­ed to use the small sums al­lo­cat­ed for restora­tion to do oth­er things: “Then you would have de­lib­er­ate­ly con­tributed to the build­ing run­ning down.”

When Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed for­mer CoP Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob, he en­dorsed Williams’ com­ments.