The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

Grand Bahama’s Chamber of Commerce yesterday urged the government to speed-up its nationalisation of the island’s airport “in the best interests of the Bahamian people”.

Gregory Laroda told a webinar organised by the Government-appointed Economic Recovery Committee that Grand Bahama International Airport’s (GBIA) post-Dorian state will continue to impede the island’s development.

He said: “On Grand Bahama, we have a lot of issues other than Dorian and COVID-19 that we need to be addressing because we were not doing that good even prior to those two events.

“When we look at keys to recovery, there are a number of recommendations that would have come forward from both islands and, on Grand Bahama, I believe to residents of the island, the ones that I will speak to tonight are pretty much obvious and a lot of folks have been in discussions around those.”

He added: “First on that list is to resolve the situation with the international and domestic airport. The terminal received major damages during Dorian and has not really seen any significant repairs since then.

“Repairs were done to one of the small terminals to facilitate some form of travel, but we are still a long way off. That’s one of the key issues to address if we are looking for the economy of Grand Bahama to start to recover.”

Mr Laroda added that the recommendations for the airport have been “mainly that it’s time that the Government take control of that airport, but the feeling is that the Government should not pay any significant amount of money for that airport.

“I have heard it said that some persons don’t feel the Government should pay more than maybe $1 for it, considering it is in a bad state of affairs,” he said. “The current owners would have collected or started to collect insurance money from the infrastructure itself. The Government would be taking over a major operational expense of the airport, and currently the airport is not making any money.”

Mr Laroda said negotiations with current owners, the Grand Bahama Port Authority/Hutchison Group, should not be allowed to drag on. He added that the Government needs to be “firm”, and if the current owners cannot voluntarily relinquish control then it should just “walk away” and “mandate that the current owners live up to their obligations and repair the airport to a standard that is acceptable internationally and would allow the return of pre-clearance by the US”.