Photo: (L-R) Luis Munoz (Piedroba Consulting Group) Jelle Prins (Piedroba Consulting Group) and Allan Herrera (Nextera Environmental and Engineering Consultants)
BELIZE CITY, Thurs. July 6, 2023
The international consultants for the Waterloo Port of Belize (PBL) expansion project were flown in for a press conference today where they joined their local consultant to underscore their position that the Government of Belize (GoB) has perpetrated a “grave injustice” against them. They ask the Government to review PBL’s environmental clearance process anew and correct their “wrong.”
Luis Munoz of Piedroba Consulting Group affirmed in his opening statement, “We have long suspected that the Government of Belize deliberately, irrationally and consciously withheld approval of the Port of Belize project for the benefit of the [Portico] Port of Magical Belize and its backers. And these recently leaked documents, including the [Portico] Definitive Agreement and various Cabinet actions, show that these suspicions were indeed correct.” As the project consultants, however, they could not shed any light on any progress regarding the Ashcroft Alliance’s threat of lawsuits and international arbitration over which of three port projects is allowed to come to fruition. Locally, the Alliance has threatened suits over unanswered information requests under the Freedom of Information Act on the Portico project, and issues have been raised about the selection of tribunal members in the appeal process regarding environmental clearance that was twice denied for the PBL project.
Munoz shared that several years ago, GoB had asked PBL to consider building a cruise port at its existing facility, and based on assurances given, they invested heavily in preparing the required plans. He said, “At that time, and given that in 2008 a cruise project had been approved at that site, that it was going to be sited within an existing port, and that this project would potentially bring great wealth and expanded cargo, that this process – as long as we followed the necessary and prescribed legal steps of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process that’s defined by Belize law, that it would be a straightforward approval.” He later clarified that they were assured due process, but said that did not play out in practice.
According to Munoz, their EIA process occurred parallel to that for Portico’s Port of Magical Belize, but theirs was denied, even though it would have been less impactful environmentally. The consultants highlighted that, while Port of Magical was proposed to be constructed in an undeveloped location, PBL’s was to be sited entirely within an existing facility. Munoz described the PBL location as “previously disturbed land which has little to no environmental value.” He listed scale as another reason why the PBL project is preferred, since Port of Magical would be constructed on 235 acres of land with a 9.5 km channel – 2.5 km greater than PBL’s project. Additionally, Munoz says the Magical project proposed to dredge a million cubic yards more than theirs, which proposes 7.5 million cubic yards. Comparatively, said Munoz, unlike with Port of Magical, there is no concern about impact on manatees as regards their project.
One of the issues of concern addressed again today at the press conference was the proposal in Waterloo’s first EIA of 2020 that the One Man Caye Channel be widened to accommodate new and larger vessels. Since then, Munoz says simulation exercises have proven that oasis class ships (the largest cruise vessels currently) can access One Man Caye Channel and so they have clarified that widening of the channel won’t be necessary and “our project ends at the end of our access channel 7.5 km away from the Port of Belize where the channel opens up. There was no request for approval to touch the channel.”
The trio of consultants at the head table affirmed that they did everything that was asked of them to allay and address concerns regarding the Waterloo project, and turning it down sends the wrong signal to investors as it raises an issue of trust and fair play. Local consultant Allan Herrera of Nextera Environmental and Engineering Consultants described the denial of environmental clearance for the PBL project by the National Environmental Appraisal Committee (NEAC) as “really, a political decision cloaked as an environmental decision under the environmental pretexts that there were going to be some environmental impacts in that area.” However, he rebutted, “… everything passes into that area. The Haulover Creek is there. All the waste from Belize City passes through there. On top of that, the water in that area is already murky.”
Answering a question about the project possibly being denied due to the reputational risk of the principal behind this project (Michael Ashcroft) being an “advantage taker” in Belize, Munoz declared, “a very important element of any regulatory process is that it is blind to those things. It is merit-based. A project’s approval should be based on the facts.”
Herrera closed off the conference describing the entire situation as a perfect storm, and he called on the powers that be to “do the right thing. We want them to go back over this process and correct the wrong that has been done.” He referenced an article he read where the writer was lamenting, “‘we are nowhere closer to getting shore side berthing – after all this time of talking about we need to have shore side berthing after some period, otherwise we’d be losing within the cruise tourism industry.’ And I’ll tell you what, right now we are no nearer than in 2012 because Magical hasn’t started yet; we haven’t had our approval. So, we have a perfect storm here.” He manifested that because the system was tampered with, and things were not transparent, there are now lawsuits and “God knows where this will all end. It never had to be … We don’t feel good about what happened. We felt like we were taken advantage of. In this country we have a saying, ‘God noh like dirty.’ And we have to fight it … and in fighting them we defend democracy for all Belizeans.”