The Tribune

By PAVEL BAILEY

BAHAMAS National Trust director Eric Carey said the BNT continues to monitor Disney’s construction works at Lighthouse Point to ensure environmental safety.

In an interview with The Tribune, Mr Carey said the BNT wants to ensure the work is in accordance with environmental safety regulations.

While Mr Carey acknowledged that to Disney’s credit they had put a lot of effort into ensuring they had a credible Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), he said the BNT and other national environmental bodies carefully reviewed their proposal to ensure its sincerity.

“From what I’ve read I would say that Disney put a lot of effort into making sure that they had a credible EIA, credible Environmental Management Plan (EMP),” Mr Carey recently told The Tribune. I think they were concerned about their brand, they didn’t want it to appear that they wanted to make any shortcuts and so they produced a quality document. We all reviewed it. We gave basic comments, but in the end the government of The Bahamas determined that the environmental impact assessment was done in accordance with law and the new regulations.”

The BNT director said further that his organisation plans to meet with Disney and its environmental manager in the coming weeks to share plans for implementing the government approved EMP.

Mr Carey added that the environmental footprint of the Lighthouse Point project was well below that of other developments in the nation and that similar cruise developments have nearly tripled the estimated impact.

“Once we meet with them we are also going to, I want to see what their real footprint is. From what we’ve seen, the footprint on the land itself is way below what is typical of a lot of other developments in the country. Certainly other cruise destinations have had 60 percent or 70 percent impact or footprint. Disney seems to be less than 25 percent and they are giving back nearly 200 acres to the government of The Bahamas for lands to be protected in conservation.”

This comes after last week’s announcement by Disney’s regional public affairs director Joey Gaskin who said that the development’s ‘built’ footprint has currently been reduced from 20 percent to 16 percent of Lighthouse Point’s total land.

In addition to planning to hire over 300 construction workers, with a largely Bahamian workforce, Disney hopes to “create sustainable economic opportunities” and as such donated the remaining $6.29m worth of 190 acre land to the government.

In addressing environmentalists’ ongoing concern about the project, while Carey had also wished that the competing National Park bid won out over Disney, he said that it would be nearly impossible to halt construction at this point. As such Carey intends to carefully monitor Disney’s development on Eleuthera so that he can guarantee that they actually stick to the Environmental Management Plan.

“So I’m sure that all of us wanted to see the alternate option, which was a National park with no cruise ship. It was private land, they acquired it, they went through the process and so now as an environmentalist one is left to either accept it or to continue fighting. The only way to fight that now is through impossible legal battles and certainly the National Trust is not going down that angle”, Carey said.

“We will likely take the path of meeting with the developer, seeing what their plans are, trying to make sure that they are sticking to the details of the Environmental Management Plan and that they, as far as what they are required to do by the departing of environmental protection, that they actually stick to that and that they carry out the EMP to the same level and degree that was put into their comprehensive EIA.”