Posted on November 14, 2017
The tourism ministry’s chief officer outlined a precise timeline for the progress of the cruise berthing project when he answered questions in Finance Committee Wednesday. But conflicting messages from the premier on the unresolved talks with the cruise lines, which were revealed Friday, and environmental questions over coral relocation throw the timeframe into question. The still controversial project saw members of the Legislative Assembly, including the speaker, involved in another heated exchange over the history of the proposed development and current issues relating to the costly facility, with the opposition alluding to the secrecy and marginalisation of the port authority.
As the committee began examining appropriations for Deputy Premier Moses Kirkconnell’s tourism ministry, Chief Officer Stran Bodden told members that the ministry plans a tender for bidders who wish to pre-qualify for the project before the end of this month and for bids to be returned in the New Year, when a short list will be created.
The successful qualifiers will then be invited to bid on the project in March next year, which will be due back in May. Bodden said the evaluation was expected to happen in June before going to the Central Tenders Committee, which would be expected to announce the successful bidder in August; shortly after that the contract would be awarded. He said pre-construction work would then start at the end of 2018.
But as he closed the budget debate Friday, Premier Alden McLaughlin made it clear that government’s talks with the cruise lines over their commitment to the project were far from complete.
“The reason why the deal hasn’t gone more quickly …is because the cruise lines have been used to, in Jamaica and in Honduras and anywhere else they’ve gone, to walking in and saying ‘this is the deal if you want the port’,” he said. “We are not prepared to do that.”
McLaughlin was emphatic that no piers would be built unless the cruise lines were part of the deal, saying that “they must have as much to lose or gain as the people” of the Cayman Islands. He explained that the financing model for the project would be from passenger fees, so if the cruise lines don’t bring the people they won’t get paid, and the project hung on the guarantee of a certain number of passengers from the ships.
Following suggestions that the project could cost anything from $100-300 million, the premier said that the costings are not complete so there was no fixed figure, and if government was to suggest an estimate it would only fuel the speculation. He also refuted allegations that secret deals were being made behind closed doors with unspecified conglomerates.
Given that scenario, the report from Bodden that a tender for pre-qualifying could be going out in the next two or three weeks is surprising, even more so given Bodden’s own comments about attempts that are expected to be made on coral relocation.
Even after a redesign that would take the piers further out to sea, the project will destroy a significant amount of reef, and the ministry has said it plans to relocate the coral in the dredging footprint. Bodden told Finance Committee that an application had been made to the Department of Environment for a pilot project to run simultaneously with the tendering process, and around $1.8 million has been set aside in the 2018 budget, much of which will be spent on this relocation trial.
Bodden said the ministry wanted to see if “the methodology we are proposing works …before doing it on larger scale”.
He said coral relocation has been done around the world in different ways and the ministry wants to “take up a whole block of seabed with coral on it”, which would then be relocated to a donor site. He said one of the many problems with this method was to “check that it doesn’t crumble as we relocate it”.
The proposed experimental method is different from the work the DoE has already begun, which involves coral recruitment, where juvenile corals or free-swimming coral planulae attach to stone tiles; later the tiles are collected and moved to the relocation site and reattached there. Although it takes longer and is more costly, this process potentially results in more diversity in the new reef, experts from the DoE recently explained to CNS.
The application for the relocation of whole blocks of seabed is the second made to the DoE. Department officials have previously advised the ministry that breaking up sections of the existing coral spur and groove reef formation and relocating large chunks posed a real threat of active destruction of coral without any understanding the likelihood of success. The DoE confirmed it had received a new submission to do the trial outside of a marine protected area, which would now be considered by the National Conservation Council.
When asked by opposition members about the timelines of all this, Bodden admitted it could take a long time. He implied the construction could be delayed and it could take more than four years to complete the piers, even if the work began at the end of next year, as efforts to save the reefs would have to continue throughout the construction period.
As opposition members grilled both the tourism minster and his chief officer about the project, the issue of the lack of involvement by the Port Authority of the Cayman Islands Board was also raised. That started a heated exchange between the speaker and the opposition member for East End, Arden McLean, who reminded the committee about the last time the board was excluded. He recalled the board resignations following the decision by McKeeva Bush, the premier at the time, to terminate the deal with GLF Construction Corp, which was poised to undertake the project, in order to give it to the Beijing-based firm, China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC).
Bush refuted the allegations made by McLean that the board was kept in the dark, even though McLean read from the relevant board minutes suggesting otherwise, and said McLean’s “facts gave rise to other facts” , as the Finance Committee proceedings erupted into another row between the speaker and opposition members before FS Chairman Roy McTaggart was able to restore calm.
Moses Kirkconnell also accused opposition MLA Alva Suckoo of cherry picking from the PricewaterhouseCoopers outline business case, which found that the data was insufficient to justify the scale of the project and the damage to the marine eco-system more than outweighed any benefits that could be gained from the development of piers. The minister pointed to an additional part of the OBC, which was done later, that took into account the additional spend of passengers. That, combined with the redesign, he claimed, made the project worthwhile.
Source: CaymanNewsService
