The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Government hopes to finish and issue the New Providence landfill management tender before year-end, a Cabinet Minister yesterday saying: "All options are on the table."

Romauld Ferreira, minister of the environment and housing, told Tribune Business that the Request for Proposal (RFP) will not seek to "restrict" what potential bidders "can and cannot do".

As a result, he suggested the Minnis administration was likely to receive "hybrid" bids involving both recycling and waste-to-energy components, while others focused on one or the other.

Emphasising that resolving the New Providence landfill's challenge remained "a very important priority" for himself and the Government, Mr Ferreira said another objective was for the facility to also deal with waste generated on the Family Islands if the need arose.

Promising that the RFP will be finished "very soon", the Minister expressed optimism that a preferred bidder would be selected, and a management contract sealed, some time in 2018.

"We're actually working on that assiduously," Mr Ferreira told Tribune Business of the revised tender documents. "We are going through the formal RFP line by line to make sure it meets our objectives, which is a landfill that can receive all the waste generated on New Providence and has the potential to receive waste from the Family Islands if need be.

"We have been given Cabinet approval to finalise the RFP, and issue it to the public. We should finish it very soon; we're actively working on it. It's an urgent priority. At the end of the day we want to improve the quality of life for Bahamians on New Providence. It's something we take very seriously, and hope to have that [RFP] completed shortly."

Mr Ferreira said that, once completed, the RFP will undergo a "peer review" by all relevant government agencies to ensure its content is correct and all relevant technical/engineering components have been addressed.

The Minnis administration, upon taking office after the May 10 election, cancelled the landfill tender process initiated by the former Christie administration just weeks before it was voted out.

That RFP attracted two bids, one of which was from the 10-strong Bahamian consortium, Waste Resources Development Group (WRDG), and its financial partner, Providence Advisors.

Respondents had been given less than two weeks to submit a proposal, but representatives of the former government suggested its successor was making a mistake in 'reinventing the wheel', confirming it had selected WRDG as the preferred bidder.

Mr Ferreira, though, yesterday sought to justify cancelling the RFP on the basis that its "downfall" lay in a combination of the tight deadline and "errors" contained in the documents.

"The first thing is the timeline. It will be much longer than people were dealing with before," he told Tribune Business. "You have to give potential proponents sufficient time to do their assessment, and the verbiage in the document has to convey exactly what you want to get; the solution you want to get.

"Something like this can't be rushed, but it has to be done expeditiously. The terms are speed and accuracy. You don't want to compromise accuracy so that important tenets and components are not contemplated."

Despite acknowledging that the RFP should detail the solution the Government is seeking, Mr Ferreira said it did not want to limit the ingenuity of potential operators seeking to manage the Tonique Williams Highway site.

"We don't want to restrict what potential respondents or proponents of the RFP do by restricting what they can and can't do," he told Tribune Business. "There's no option that will not be on the table."

The Minister described waste-to-energy as "one end of the spectrum" in terms of resolving the landfill's problems, with management, recycling and tipping fees at the other end.

He suggested that the Government may receive "hybrid" bids combining elements of waste-to-energy and recycling, but reiterated that potential bidders needed time to conduct due diligence on the New Providence landfill to determine what was feasible.

On waste-to-energy, Mr Ferreira said potential bidders would first need to analyse the content and volume of the landfill's incoming waste streams to see if there was sufficient fuel, and of the right type. Once this was determined, they would then need to talk to Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) to see if it could sell any electricity to the latter's grid and, if so, how much.

"These are all questions we're cognisant of, and want to give the relevant players time to consider these matters," he explained. "If you're a businessman, I don't think you'd cut yourself off from a potential revenue stream."

Describing the landfill as "a national asset", Mr Ferreira said its reform, clean-up and proper operation was an "important piece of the puzzle" in cleaning up New Providence and the Bahamas generally.

He emphasised that the waste created by clean-up efforts had to be deposited at the landfill and potentially recycled, helping "to change the culture of Bahamians to the material and built environment".

The Government remains under pressure from both Bahamians, especially those living near the landfill, and investors such as Albany and Baha Mar to resolve persistent woes that have resulted in the eruption of large fires. These threaten people's health and the environment, plus the Bahamian tourism product.

"I won't give up," Mr Ferreira told Tribune Business. "I remain optimistic. This is a very, very important project for me and the Government. This involves the health and welfare of the entire population of New Providence.

"Depending on the direction of the prevailing wind, and if there is an incident at the landfill, such an incident has the potential to impact the entire island. We're only 21 miles by seven miles."

The Christie administration had outsourced the landfill's management to Renew Bahamas, but they pulled out in late 2016 following Hurricane Matthew, citing safety concerns and a lack of government support.

The then-government suggested the pull-out related more to financial losses stemming from Renew Bahamas' flawed business plan, but the end result was that the Department of Environmental Health Services (DEHS) had to resume operational control of the landfill.