The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

THE Minnis administration’s rationale in a resolution last year for abandoning the Phil’s Food Store building as the site of the General Post Office was not supported by the assessment of independent engineers contracted to evaluate the building.

A plan to move the post office to the Phil’s building was first announced in March, 2018 but by October the administration had reversed its decision and decided instead on the Town Centre Mall, which is partly owned by St Anne’s MP Brent Symonette. Mr Symonette was a sitting Cabinet minister at the time. He resigned from his Cabinet post earlier this month.

A resolution passed in the House of Assembly on October 24, 2018 to lease the mall said the government “only recently discovered that the latent structural defects and technical issues (of the Phil’s building) would require a massive expenditure of taxpayer dollars in conducting extensive renovations to the entire building which would take at least a year or more.”

How the administration arrived at this conclusion has now been questioned by the engineer it hired to assess the building.

Basil McIntosh, an engineer with decades of experience, said yesterday: “All I remember hearing, based on the news reports, was that there were some structural defects with the building which I did not agree with it because we did the report and whatever we discovered was wrong on the building wasn’t anything of note.”

The government received the engineering report from Mr McIntosh’s company, McACE Technical Services Ltd, six weeks before passing its resolution in Parliament. The company was hired by the Ministry of Works last year “to carry out a comprehensive structural assessment” of Phil’s building, an exercise it began on August 28, 2018. Engineers reported that the “entire structure” of the Phil’s building was “in very good condition” and “could be safely utilised for approximately another 20 to 25 years without any major maintenance work.

“It is our opinion,” the report said, “that should our recommended minor remedial measures be carried out, the structural integrity of the captioned building will be enhanced.”

The report, obtained by The Tribune yesterday, went unnoticed when Englerston MP Glenys Hanna Martin tabled it in the House of Assembly last year. But it has resurfaced as the controversy over the lease of the Town Centre Mall returned to the spotlight when Mr Symonette revealed earlier this week that Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis called him personally to negotiate the deal last year.

The Office of the Prime Minister has declined to confirm the date of that call, and further suggested the admission made by the former minister represented a breach of confidentiality.

“The assertion that the prime minister would personally and unilaterally negotiate a proposal that has gone on over two administrations is nonsensical,” the OPM said in a statement last week.

Still, Mr Symonette’s revelation appeared to contradict the part of the resolution which said: “Whereas one of the beneficial owners of the said Town Centre Mall is a serving Cabinet minister who did not take part in the discussions leading to the decision to accept the offer to lease portions of the building...”

In his first public interview regarding the Phil’s building, Mr McIntosh said: “I try not to get involved in these things because I don’t want to be seen as biased or anything. And even though I was not involved with assessing the Town Centre Mall, I was familiar with the building and to put it bluntly, I think if any building should have been demolished it should have been that building because from a structural perspective, from what I’ve seen and even the repair work going on now which I see when I go to get my boxes, it’s not being done professionally the way it should be done.”

In his report, his company concluded: “Our investigations reveal that there are no structural concerns (with the Phil’s building). Therefore we have concluded that the existing structure is in no imminent danger of structural compromise or collapse...Throughout this exercise it was discovered that there are no major repairs to be done. During our examinations and assessment, we have discovered that the entire structure is in very good condition. However, evidence reveals that some cosmetic architectural features (painting etc) which are non-structural can be carried out with standard construction materials.”

One source suggested yesterday that the resolution’s references to the building’s “structure” and “technical defects” may have been imprecise terms that don’t capture the real problems with the building, which were mechanical in nature. Indeed, Transport Minister Renward Wells never discussed a problem with the building’s structure during his speech in Parliament on the lease. Instead, he said after the government acquired the building, it discovered “that it was stripped of electrical wiring, plumbing and air conditioning components that were intended to be part and parcel of the renovations.”

“This act of vandalism greatly increased the construction cost and the construction time,” he said at the time. “When we said we were interested in the building and inspected the building it was in one state. It had the air conditioning units, the electrical wiring. When we finally acquired the building, to our surprise and dismay what we were left was not what we got.”

Never referencing the analysis of structural engineers, he said it was an assessment by the Ministry of Works which determined that a design for the building was incomplete and as a result a “minimum of one year would be required to complete the drawings and the necessary renovations and as a result the cost to renovate Phil’s would far exceed the cost the $4m allocated for that.”

Mrs Hanna Martin, however, believes the language of the resolution must be treated as authoritative.

“The constitution requires a resolution,” she said. “They brought this resolution, the contents of which were not accurate and we know they were not accurate in two ways. One, there was no structural engineering report justifying their decision to rent from a Cabinet minister and abandon the previous building like the resolution says. Secondly, they said in the resolution that the relevant member did not engage in discussions prior to the lease but we have now heard him say publicly that he was involved in discussions so the question is whether there were a couple of misleading statements in that resolution.

“The resolution is the record of the Parliament about why the government chose to rent from a Cabinet minister. What is said during the debate is supplemental but the resolution is historical authority on the matter.”

As for reports the Ministry of Works concluded it would cost more than $4m to move the post office to Phil’s building, Mr McIntosh said, in his professional experience, this is hard to believe even if the building had no electrical wires, plumbing and air conditioning units.

“The building wasn’t bad as some people try to make it out to be,” he said.

Mr Wells, who is travelling on government business, could not be reached for comment yesterday. When contacted about the report, Minister of Public Service Brensil Rolle stressed that there was a desperate need to get a new site for the General Post Office up and running for the benefit of employees and the public.