Dear Editor,
To the Government of Belize: my family and I fell in love with Placencia Village and its people on our very first overnight visit here almost 6 years ago. Since then we have developed many friendships with local residents and business owners and workers from other communities who rely on the overnight tourist business in Placencia for their livelihoods.
We have made significant personal financial investment here in the form of a second home for ourselves and some sales/rental units. Our project created wealth for the previous property owner; employment for many skilled and unskilled locals involved in the year plus construction; profits for businesses involved in home outfitting, maintenance and repair; revenues for the electric, water and cable utility companies; food sales; souvenir shop sales; restaurant revenues; tour revenues; and G.S.T. for the GOB.
We have also attracted other visitors to Belize and Placencia Village over the years. Along the way we have suffered the same inconvenience of electric outages, water shortages, property crime and spotty sanitation services as fellow Villagers. We’ve waited in hopeful expectation with them for this government’s ratification of our Village By-Laws so that our elected leaders have the authority to compel measures that promote public safety, prudent growth and needed maintenance of our community.
Government approval of the proposed Cruise Tourism Facility and Welcome Village offers no discernable financial or other benefit to the local community. That it will overtax the community’s resources and expose our community to the potentially catastrophic ecological, economic and social harm (cf. offshore cobia fish farm) has been well documented by other critics of the plan.
We are under no illusion that GOB’s approval will be the first of a series of immutable steps toward despoiling some of Southern Belize’s most precious and fragile human and natural resources. The compelling and sober arguments already made against such a project have not been rebutted by anyone’s case for any significant social or economic benefit that would come out of it for the locale, or country as a whole.
Under the circumstances, we hope that we can rely on you to act in a manner that quiets our uneasiness about the transparency, integrity and responsiveness of government and reaffirms Belize government’s commitment to the rigorous and intelligent stewardship of our national resources and to social justice and economic opportunity for all.
Joseph Garipoli
Nov. 1, 2010