Dear Editor,

I write in reference to the Prime Minister’s remarks at his press conference on Wednesday on the subject of the Puerto Azul project on Lighthouse Reef. Mr. Barrow suggested that the objection by environmental and tourism groups was premature because “we don’t know quite what the project is”. I don’t know exactly who the Prime Minister is referring to when he says “we,” but anyone who was at the launch party in Cannes – and that includes Ministers Contreras and Heredia as well as First Lady Kim Barrow – or has read their literature or has met the principals in person is very much aware of what they are proposing.

I had the good fortune to attend a meeting with the Puerto Azul developers on June 25 at the Matalon building in Belize City. Heading the delegation was Italian businessman Domenico Giannini who led a large team including his hired environmental and engineering consultants as well as his local representative, Sunjay Hotchandani. The purpose of the meeting was for local environmental NGOs to listen to what the developer was proposing and over the next two hours we did just that. We heard the developer’s plans straight from the “horse’s mouth”.

The basic premise of the developer was that the area around their proposed site at Northern Two Cayes was environmentally “stressed” and that the completion of their project – essentially establishing a “citadel of luxury” for one thousand guests and two thousand workers – was the best way to “save” the area’s environment.

For the sake of brevity I will not detail all the luxury amenities the developer is proposing but instead focus on the three elements that Mr. Giannini said he “must have” or he could not move forward with the project. These are:

1) Approval to construct three hundred guest villas. This could be done in phases, he said, but approval for the full amount would have to be guaranteed from the start.

2) Approval to build a full service marina. That marina would likely necessitate the dredging of a deeper entrance to the site through the reef and would entail the “relocation” of coral structures, a practice that the developer’s environmental consultants said could easily be done.

3) Approval to construct an international airport near to the cayes that would be dredged from the publicly owned seabed. It was explained that early reports that the airport would be located on the reef were false and that the airport would in fact be dredged from the sand and seagrass beds within the atoll.

The runway, they explained, would be 10,480 feet long (two miles) plus an apron of to-be-determined size. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations, not knowing the exact location or water depth of their proposed airport site, show that it would require the dredging of a minimum of five million cubic yards of material from the seabed.

These three “conditions” did not come from some champagne-induced hyperbole at a marketing party or from some out of date website. They came from the mouth of the project’s principal at a meeting attended by over a dozen serious-minded people. I am informed that they were repeated at another meeting that same day with government officials in Belmopan.

To me it is absolutely clear that by the Investment Committee’s own criteria the airport alone disqualifies the project and it should therefore be rejected from the start. My main point in writing, however, is to point out the fallacy of the Prime Minister’s assertion (and those equally disingenuous statements by Ministers Heredia and Hulse) that “we don’t know quite what the project is”.

The fact is we know all we need to know about this project. By any measure it stinks and should never have received serious consideration. What should worry all of us is the attitude of our so-called leaders who would have us believe that the official jury is still out when it appears that the jury has in fact been bought and paid for and all we are waiting for is for the judge to bang his gavel.

Sincerely,

 

 

Stewart Krohn
Cocoplum
Placencia Peninsula