26.7 C
Belize City
Thursday, March 28, 2024

World Down Syndrome Day

Photo: Students and staff of Stella Maris...

BPD awards 3 officers with Women Police of the Year

Photo: (l-r) Myrna Pena, Carmella Cacho, and...

Suicide on the rise!

Photo: Iveth Quintanilla, Mental Health Coordinator by Charles...

NEAC rejects Waterloo’s cruise port proposal

HeadlineNEAC rejects Waterloo’s cruise port proposal

BELIZE CITY, Wed. Dec. 15, 2021– This week, it was reported that the National Environmental Appraisal Committee (NEAC) had decided to deny Waterloo Investment Holdings environmental clearance for its proposed construction of a cruise port at Port of Belize Ltd. and the expansion of its bulk cargo facility at that location. The response of the board of directors of Waterloo Investment Holdings to that decision was swift. They released a statement in which they pointed, not to the substantial environmental concerns surrounding the project, but to what they are claiming is a desire on the part of certain NEAC members to retaliate against the company due to its refusal to pay them the bribes they allegedly requested.

“The Board of Waterloo is satisfied that NEAC’s denial of environmental clearance and the DOE’s rubberstamping of that denial is fundamentally flawed and comes against the backdrop of provable requests for bribes from certain NEAC members and a discredited DOE whose Chief Environmental Officer [who] was recently obliged to retire for highly questionable decisions related to another cruise port facility under his watch,” the release issued by Waterloo states.

In a November 24 letter sent to the CEO in the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Risk Management, Dr. Kenrick Williams, the company expressed “deep

Dr. Kenrick Williams

concern” over how the approval process for their project has been handled. In this letter, the company listed “the role of the former Chief Environmental Officer, Martin Alegria, the unethical behavior of National Environmental Appraisal Committee members and the DOE’s failure to manage its own timelines and follow the process as set out by the Terms of Reference and rule of law” as the reasons its project was rejected.

They went on to make a serious allegation against members of the NEAC — claiming that during different stages in the process some have approached them with requests for bribes.

The letter to CEO Williams alleged, “Several NEAC members… at different stages of the NEAC approval process, have directly and indirectly approached us and offered to ‘assist’ in the answering of NEAC questions in exchange for financial remuneration.”

The company claims that they declined all the advances but believe they are being punished for not “bending to the unscrupulous solicitations.”

The claims made in the letter shifted the focus of the public discussion surrounding the project away from environmental and economic risks posed by the various cruise port projects in the country and toward the integrity of key decision-makers in the environmental review process. What Minister of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, Hon. Orlando Habet, pointed out to local reporters when the allegations being made by Waterloo first became public, however, is that the company has so far failed to indicate which, and how many, of the 16 members of the NEAC had approached the company and what was the nature of such bribe requests. He said that, in fact, the company has provided no specific information to substantiate such claims.

“From the letter that they sent in, those allegations or statements made were indeed vague because they did not give any details as to what those keep-backs or hold-backs or back stops were, and so they didn’t clarify, and so we had asked them for clarification, so the CEO had responded to them, and there was a back and forth, two or three letters, between the CEO and principals of Waterloo,” Minister Habet told a 7News reporter. He further stated, “…what happened is one of the responses from the CEO to them was for them to come up, if these are allegations, then can they substantiate the allegations so if it’s to call names, or say what it was, we don’t know exactly what the prescribed bribery, so to speak, that he mentioned in the letter… We had requested that they give us some substantiation on the allegations so that then we can pursue it, because we don’t know if it’s one individual, two individuals that they are talking about. It is a group of the NEAC, I mean we have 16 NEAC members, so it’s out there, it’s anybody’s guess, so if they cannot substantiate it, then it’s difficult for us to pursue anything!”

Nonetheless, the company outlined serious objections to the way the process was handled. The company alleged that the process to get environmental clearance on its project, which has lasted over three years, has been chaotic. The company further noted that former Chief Environmental Officer, Martin Alegria, who, they say had recused himself from the process in an October 27th email, passing over responsibility to the new NEAC chairman, CEO in the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Dr. Kenrick Williams, but sent a letter dated November 8 requesting an additional addendum for the project.

In the letter to CEO Williams, the CEO of the company, Stewart Howard, states, “More concerning, however, was your email on November 14, where you were clearly unaware of Mr. Alegria’s correspondence from the previous week, excluded Mr. Alegria’s successors from the email chain but maintain Mr. Alegria in copy (despite his removal from his post some 4 days earlier).”

The letter sent to Waterloo on November 14 by CEO Williams alerted the company to expect an overview of concerns arising from the NEAC site visit and public consultations. The company is arguing, however, that the sole purpose of the second consultation was to deal with the newly proposed nearshore placement method of dredged material and the removal of its proposal to discard such material offshore, and according to the company, none of the questions during the second consultation addressed these issues.

Waterloo, a Lord Michael Ashcroft-affiliated company which has reportedly invested $5 million so far in the project, has said it will seek all available avenues to ensure its rights, “including but not limited to the appeal process under the Environmental Laws of Belize, judicial review of a NEAC decision clearly tainted with illegality and irrationality and treaty rights under the Bilateral Investments Treaty between Belize and the United Kingdom.”

They will also seek full disclosure of the submission made to the DOE and NEAC by Stake Bank Enterprise Ltd. for the construction of the Port Coral cruise terminal and Portico Enterprise Ltd. for the construction of Port of Magical Belize — both of which have gotten environmental clearance. Waterloo is asserting that it wants to cross-check the applications submitted by these developers to ensure they were treated equitably.

What appears to have been placed in the background of the discussion during this most recent face-off between Waterloo and the NEAC/DOE, however, are the weighty environmental concerns surrounding the project — particularly the disposal methods that would be deployed by the company to discard millions of cubic meters of dredged waste material.

When questioned by local reporters about Waterloo’s allegations, Minister Orlando Habet had pointed out that the company had not fully indicated how it would dispose of all the dredged waste material that would result from the project.

“If you recall originally, their proposal was to put the ten million cubic meters of material close to Turneffe, near the reef, and I think after the first evaluation, after the consultations with the public, that was thrown out and they were requested to submit another proposal or sites that they can dump that seabed material, and they did so. I think some of it was suggested to be put onshore, nearshore, and offshore and I believe that one of the things that NEAC had requested was that they didn’t see the total amount that they originally said they were going to take out in those three when they combined, so they were asking, ‘Could you submit information as to where’s the missing amount of material and when you combine the three, the total doesn’t come out to what was on the first proposal’” he said.

In an interview yesterday, the Minister of Sustainable Development reiterated his point: “…some of that information is missing, as to where all that material will be placed. If there are ten, for example, and you [are] showing me eight, where is the other two cubic meters? So, I think some of that. As I said, I don’t know all the details, but it doesn’t sound like they have provided all the information asked for,” he said.

It is also to be noted that Belize Water Services Ltd., in response to the proposed dredging and disposal methods that were presented in the company’s updated EIA addendum (in which the initial plan to dump millions of cubic meters of dredged waste material between English Caye and the Turneffe Atoll was scrapped and the company proposed instead to dump those waste products on nearshore and onshore designated areas), stepped forward to express its concerns and to make GoB and the public aware that if the project were to be given the green light, the dredged waste material would be dumped between its sewer ponds and on top of an important mangrove wetland used for wastewater treatment.

These sewers receive approximately 1.6 million gallons of wastewater for treatment each day, which is discharged through canals into the Caribbean Sea.

“BWS is greatly concerned by the developer’s proposal to dredge and to place 7.5 million cubic meters of dredged material between the location of BWS’s sewer ponds and the Caribbean Sea,” the letter had stated.

The release from Waterloo says that they spared no expenses and retained the best scientific experts to produce over 15,000 pages of data.

We are awaiting an official statement from the DOE and NEAC on this matter.

“I can confirm that NEAC recommended that environmental clearance is not granted to Waterloo at this time. I cannot discuss the details on which that recommendation was made.” CEO Williams told us, following a request for confirmation.

Check out our other content

World Down Syndrome Day

Suicide on the rise!

Check out other tags:

International