This hint came from Minister of Health David Estwick last Friday.

He said he was reviewing the matter more closely, but declined to reveal any more about the issue.

Last Wednesday, acting general manager of the Sanitation Service Authority (SSA), Stanton Alleyne, who oversees the $20 million project, said it would be finished by Friday.

"Everything should have been finished but it was delayed by the weather but almost everything is finished.

"When this is completed it will be a modern landfill with all the safety precautions in place to protect the environment. So we will be able to accept waste from February 8," he said.

Alleyne said that the retrofitting project, which began in December 2006 and was scheduled to be completed by December 2007, came within budget, but that the facility would not be in use until the transfer station at Vaucluse, St Thomas, was completed.

Financial issues

Constructed by British firm McArdle in conjunction with C.O. Williams Construction, the controversial landfill had financial issues from the start of the project.

Last February, a highly-placed source in the Ministry of Health confirmed that the costs, when added to the approximate $20 million spent on the site before engineers deemed it unfit to receive garbage, meant taxpayers would end up paying more than $40 million for the
state-of-the-art garbage disposal site.

Alleyne explained last week that a leachate treatment plant, which was not part of the $20 million project, "is in but the plant for cleaning up the leachate is being tendered and evaluated."

The leachate treatment plant would sort and prepare the garbage for transport to the landfill.

Meanwhile, Ricardo Marshall, project manager of the Solid Waste Project Unit, which has responsibility for the transfer station and composting facility and a chemical waste storage facility being built at Vaucluse, St Thomas, said he did not want to answer any questions about the project, until he had reviewed the Estimates. (TM)

tracymoore@nationnews.com