Parliament repairs nearing $3 mil

If all goes according to plan, lawmakers will move back to the Parliament Building in The City by the end of January or early February next year.

This view was expressed by Minister of Housing, Lands and Maintenance Dr William Duguid on Tuesday as he addressed his colleagues during debate for a supplementary to the Estimates for various government ministries totalling $95,966,535.

Some $2.8 million of that amount was for renovation work being done on the Parliament Buildings.

Without giving an exact date for completion of those renovations, Duguid said: “The buildings unit is making a tremendous effort and we are trying our best to finish at the end of January.

“We are working day and night. Even during [the height of] the COVID pandemic we applied for permission and was granted by the Attorney General to work day and night, doing as much as we can at night and leaving the heavy work to the day. A lot of work is going on there. It is coming to the end but we are finding new things [that need to be done],” said Duguid.

Both Houses of Parliament meet at the Worthing Corporate Centre in Hastings, Christ Church, because of the renovation being carried out on the east wing of Parliament.

Duguid said the renovations, which began in December last year, were intended to make the location “better, safer and healthier”, adding that improvements were being made to several areas including the bathrooms, kitchen, roofs and stairwell.

“So we have had to deconstruct and reconstruct how Parliament is designed in terms of how it is naturally ventilated underneath from the floor. So we had to take up the floor and put in better ventilation. We have taken up the carpet and we are changing from carpet because as you know carpet holds dust and mould,” he said.

“Then we found a lot of fibre glass in the roof and we had to go and deal with that as well. On top of that, we had an air condition problem. The air condition I understand was there from the late 1960s early 1970s and has not been changed,” he said, adding that the old AC unit weighed about 4 tonnes.

Pointing out that with the new seven-tonne air condition unit replacing the old four-tonne unit, the roof had to be re-engineered to facilitate the weight of the new system.

He suggested that the delay in the project was due to “scope creep” – an increase in the amount of work to be done due to several required changes.

“We have to do it because do we just put a plaster on or do we fix it properly now and don’t have to look at it for another 30 or 40 years? That is what we are trying to do. We want to fix it appropriately and to the best of our ability at the current time, so that we don’t have to look back at it for years to come,” said Duguid.