Posted on December 17, 2018
The IEmotions ran high at a public meeting in West Bay on Tuesday, when district residents met with the owner of Calico Jack’s beach bar and begged him to pull his application to dredge an area in Barkers that would remove more than four acres of turtle grass. Many of the people who attended told Handel Whittaker that they didn’t necessarily object to his bar being in Barkers but the environmental damage regarding the grass caused real concern. But the bar owner, who is being turfed out of his current spot on Seven Mile Beach by his landlord, Dart, said the removal of the grass was essential to the project.
At the second district meeting about the issue, which has seen West Bay unite in their objection to the project, dozens of local people came out to hear what Whittaker had to say and express their concerns.
However, once again there was a notable absence of the district’s political leaders, who, with the exception of Bernie Bush, have made almost no public comment about this project.
Nevertheless, it was Whittaker that the residents had come to hear. As he addressed the audience, he stressed that the goal was to recreate the experience of Seven Mile Beach at the location in Barkers and the dredging of the turtle grass was therefore necessary.
Without the removal of the sea grass, “it won’t be feasible”, he said. “We are in the tourism business and this is a tourism facility… When people come here on ships they want to swim in crystal clear water,” Whittaker told the meeting, as a he spoke about creating a Rum Point-type resort location.
Even after residents pointed out the obvious, that Barkers was not Seven Mile Beach and was a unique beach habitat that they wanted to preserve in that natural state, he refused to reconsider withdrawing the coastal works application to remove the sea grass. He said it was now down to the Department of Environment and government whether or not the project went ahead.
The audience, however, disagreed.
“Caymanian to Caymanian, I am begging you not to do it,” Alice Mae Coe, a long-time district activist over beach access rights, urged Whittaker, as she warned about the piecemeal encroachment over the years of development all over Cayman. She said Barkers would be no different once it started.
Coe pointed out that the DoE is not the decision maker in this and all the department can do is offer advice to Cabinet. But she asked rhetorically if anyone could think of a time when, despite the DoE urging against coastal development, Cabinet had ever listened.
While emotions ran high, tempers were calm, with audience members seeming to sympathise with Whittaker’s predicament over losing his current location. They directed their anger towards the Dart corporation and insisted that the bar owner was being manipulated by the developer.
Many West Bayers have real concerns that this is the first effort by the islands’ most powerful investor to set the precedent and begin developing the significant amount of land that the group owns in the Barkers area. Former political candidates and local business owners, Mervin Smith and Paul Rivers, as well as many other members of the West Bay community all warned Whittaker that he was a tool in the developer’s long-term broader plans, which began with his removal from Seven Mile Beach.
Rivers said he believed Dart was using Caymanians to “do its dirty work”. He said Whittaker was doing business with “very shady people”. Accusing the developer of stealing the Caymanian identity, he added, “You just don’t realise what they are doing to you.”
Whittaker repeatedly denied that he was being manipulated or used by Dart, insisting that this was a business proposition. He said that with the pending expiration of his lease, he had approached Dart — not the other way around — about going to Barkers. It was then, he said, that the Dart representatives became enthusiastic about the idea.
Although the role of the developer in this project was never far from the surface, the environmental damage that the project poses was at the forefront of the concerns. Laura Egglishaw, who is organising the grassroots campaign to prevent the dredging of the turtle grass, was keen to emphasise that the reason for the meeting and the overall objections at the heart of the campaign is the threat to the marine environment posed by that removal.
It was also the main issue for several young West Bayers who attended the meeting and spoke eloquently about the habitat threats and their concerns about the implications, especially as the project was designed to cater to cruise tourists, who spend only a fraction of the money spent by overnight guests that visit Cayman.
Although Whittaker insisted that he was not seeking to destroy the environment at Barkers and that the development would be done in such a way as to barely impact it, he seemed entirely unaware of the extent of the threat to the wider marine habitat by the proposed dredging of 180,000 sq.ft of sea grass.
Audience members pointed to the area as a marine nursery for reef fish, as well as conch and lobster, its importance in preserving the sand on the beach, the protection it offers from storm surge and other major environmental, as well as aesthetic and cultural, concerns. Throughout the meeting the audience demonstrated the growing awareness now in Cayman of the need to take much greater action to protect the environment, as their politicians let them down in this regard.
They were worried not just about what would be removed but what the development would bring. The amount of sunscreen going into the marine habitat from as many as 500 people per day at the site and an influx of single-use plastics were just some of them. Garbage in general was raised by one of the youngest audience members, a member of the Girls Brigade, who clearly articulated the problem of garbage going into the ocean and ruining the beach.
Despite Whittaker’s protestations about preventing garbage, the young girl spoke from experience when she pointed out how much garbage she and her friends in the Girls Brigade regularly collect from tourist beach spots during weekend clean-ups.
While Whittaker answered many questions from the concerned audience, he ultimately failed to convince West Bayers to support his endeavours and was unable to alleviate any of their concerns.
He admitted that he could not say for sure how his guests would be coming to the location and said he had nothing in writing to guarantee that visitors from the cruise ships would come to the new site so far from the central Seven Mile Beach tourist district, which would in itself pose new challenges for him.
Whittaker was also unable to say why Dart had not offered him a more appropriate new location somewhere else along Seven Mile Beach, where the group now has considerable land holdings, such as the old Victoria House site.
Source: CaymanNewsService
