The Tribune

By MALCOLM STRACHAN

“That ain’t happening.”

That’s what an Abaco resident told me when I asked him about the promise that Abaco’s new shelter will be ready by the end of the year.

The Disaster Risk Management Authority says different – though the language has changed a little in the past week.

Aarone Sargent is the managing director of the DRM – and the previous week he said tha thte building would be “ready and operational by the end of the year”.

On Friday, that had become that it would be “substantially completed by December”.

Government and official bodies are good at missing deadlines of course. We’ll cover a few in this article.

My buddy is not the only one to doubt the shelter deadline. The chief councilor for Central Abaco, Faron Newbold, said it is “quite evident they need extra time”. He was generous enough to say that he thought they were “doing their best to get it completed”, but that it was “probably a bit more challenging than they expected, which could be why it’s taking extra time”.

The president of the Abaco Chamber of Commerce, Daphne DeGregory-Miaoulis, also said it would be difficult to finish the shelter by the end of the year without working overtime.

That would see extra cost added to the project of course – which has already ballooned from an estimated $1.8m when it was announced in 2020 to $4.5m. That’s public money, take note.

Should the shelter miss the deadline, it will not be the first one it has seen swoosh by. It was originally expected to be completed by May 2021. It missed that deadline by so much that a whole new government has now been in charge for longer than the entire construction period was expected to be.

Mr Sargent may of course be right this time around, but it will not be the only time Bahamians wonder why things take so long to get done.

Also in the news last week was a story about two vessels stuck – again at Abaco – in a protected marine area, doing nothing but causing damage to coral reefs and the loss of sand.

One is a barge, the other is a tugboat, and they have been stuck in Fowl Cays National Park since getting in trouble in rough weather while headed to Baker’s Bay back in March.

The Bahamas National Trust manages the area and is calling on the government to ensure the vessels get moved. The BNT noted that previous salvage efforts “have been unsuccessful due to unfavourable weather conditions and a lack of adequate equipment”.

Chief park warden for Abaco David Knowles said: “Too much time has passed, and more urgency and action from government authorities and the vessel owners are needed to prevent the situation from worsening.”

Olivia Patterson-Maura, executive director of Friends of the Environment, said: “Nearly five months later, and at the height of hurricane season, we implore the government to open lines of communication with local stakeholders and facilitate the swift removal of the vessels while mitigating any further damage.”

Back in April, the director of the Department of Environmental Planning and Protection said the vessel owners would likely face fines. No word on that since.

One of the key words mentioned by Ms Patterson-Maura is communication – something that is often missing in such cases, though credit to Mr Sargent for speaking up on his issue.

Take a separate issue, that of the women’s shelter promised by the government.

In July, the Social Services Minister said that would be ready in a few weeks. Oh, wait. That was July 2023, when Obie Wilchcombe, sadly no longer with us, was in the role.

There were going to be four such shelters in fact. Fast forward to April this year and his successor, Myles Laroda, was saying they were in the process of acquiring a property. What was quite a few weeks away back in 2023, we will never know.

By June, women’s advocates were expressing their doubt, with the Budget including funds for a shelter, but so did the previous one and that never seemed to get spent.

There has also been talk of a lack of communication, that word again, with the ministry on not just that matter but various issues, including promised consultation on issues such as marital rape and domestic violence.

Basic details about how the shelter would be operated have remained a mystery to those activists too – who are in the ideal position to be able to advise on issues such as the support people in need of the shelter ought to receive.

When will this shelter actually open its doors and serve to protect the women and children who need it? Who knows? Certainly the minister has not been forthcoming about it.

How about the Grand Lucayan sale? Back in March, we were told there were three “credible offers” on the table. Word was that an announcement was imminent. Five months later, and imminent seems to have slipped a little.

Even the US government got in on criticising delays in governance – last month a report pointed out that enactment of anti-corruption laws had been stalled.

Now let’s be fair, governing can be hard. You hit problems along the way, all while having to be mindful of the cost to the public purse.

But that’s where that word communication comes in. Is there a reason we shouldn’t know the state of things when it comes to pulling some boats out of the water and whether their owners have been fined, and how much? Is there some secret over the progress of the women’s shelter? The Grand Lucayan, sure, there will be commercial contracts involved, we can understand that – but the outcome is the same, nothing seems to have happened.

Some of these deadlines are not just being missed by weeks, but by years. So is it any surprise that locals express doubt when looking at the shelter progress in Abaco?

At the end of the year, someone will be right, someone will be wrong. We’ll see who it is.