The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Senior Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

JOBETH Colbey-Davis said that although her team is confident the Davis administration can still proceed with the Prospect Ridge project, the government cannot commit to the cost benefits the Minnis administration promised because so much work is still required on the development, including the production of a master plan, a feasibility study and topography studies.

Mrs Coleby-Davis, Minister of Transport and Housing, expressed her views during the administration’s first official press briefing at the Office of the Prime Minister.

To provide affordable housing to young professionals, the Minnis administration pledged to absorb whatever infrastructural and related costs were needed to let qualified applicants buy property for between $40,000 to $50,000.

Mrs Coleby-Davis said the Davis administration will not commit to doing the same, not least because it does not know the cost details.

“The purpose of an affordable housing programme ran by the government is to be able to allow a certain category of persons that would not generally be approved to become homeowners to be able to become homeowners, so at the front of our administration the priority is to allow more Bahamians to become homeowners,” she said.

 “I cannot work blindly. I must be able to say what costs the Davis administration will be absorbing when I go and present my case to the Cabinet and so in order for me to say that, and confidently, I have to be able to provide the information and that’s why I need to get all of the groundwork done, but we will ensure that we provide affordable housing to the Bahamian public. That’s the priority. It may not be on the same level in certain areas because it depends on how the lay of the land works, but the overall purpose is for us to provide affordable housing.”

 Mrs Colbey-Davis said her team has had many meetings related to the project and has found that there is no master plan and no feasibility study.

 “I’ve spoken to the company that was previously engaged by the former administration (to do the master plan) and absolutely nothing has been done yet,” she said. “In fact, they got a letter advising them that they have (been awarded) this project probably about two or three days before the election. So nothing has been done in terms of creating a master plan to do the work at Prospect Ridge, to begin to draw out how it will actually look. There has been no feasibility study, no topography study to actually provide us with the lay of the land, what lumps and bumps presently exist and how we would have to fill it in so we are not in a position yet to determine the infrastructural costs.”

She added: “We cannot commit to what was previously announced.

“The fact that you (had) a billboard that has a photo but you have no master plan, one wants to know where that photo came from, so did they grab it off of Google, I don’t know. We don’t know where the numbers came from for the land costs and where the pictures came from.”

However, Senator Viana Gardiner, head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit under the former administration, said a lot of work was done to make the project a reality. She said a strong foundation was established for the Davis administration to build on.

 “For this community, the former government took the legal steps to secure the land for the development and completed the conceptual sketch of the development, the detailed Environmental Impact Assessment of the land, the procurement process for infrastructural and architectural drawings, and the application process, including a review of 1,500 applications by independent accounting firms,” she said in a statement.

 “Following a bidding procurement process, Islands by Design completed the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) on the land within the allotted time frame and submitted it to the Department of Environmental Planning and Protection (DEPP) for its review.

 “The DEPP completed its review and advised the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) on the eve of the general election that the environmentalists needed to augment the EIA with topography studies. The housing minister could only have made some of her comments because of the findings from the work already done. The comments also suggest no action was taken by the Davis Administration on the DEPP’s advice.”

 Officials have said about 1,500 people applied for the programme.