Public consultation on Waterloo project held

Black Immigrant Daily News

BELIZE CITY, Fri. Sept. 2, 2022

Last night, a three-hour public consultation session was held by the Department of the Environment (DOE) on the proposed construction of a cruise terminal and expansion of the cargo facility at the Port of Belize Ltd. compound by its principal, Waterloo Investment Holdings. The session was held in Belize City at the Best Western Belize Biltmore Plaza and was attended by Belize City residents and a number of individuals who belong to groups which would be directly impacted by the outcome of the consultations. Persons from a range of groups that oppose the project, as well as individuals who support Waterloo’s unceasing push for project approval, posed questions to the panel at the session, and some made brief but passionate presentations either for or against the project. The tentative date for the National Environmental Appraisal Committee (NEAC) to begin deliberation on the project is September 19, and the period for the submission of feedback from the public was extended to September 14, 2022.

Last week we reported that over 20,000 Belizeans signed a petition indicating opposition to the project, and those signatures were presented to the Government of Belize via a public handover to the Minister of Sustainable Development, Hon. Orlando Habet. However, according to Environmental Officer Kenrick Gordon, whether or not the signatures of those 20,000 persons will have an impact on the process will depend on the NEAC, which will decide whether to recommend to the Department of the Environment that a public hearing be held in response to the voices of those 20,000 Belizeans.

“In terms of the 20,000 plus signatures, what we are having today is the public consultation. The public consultation is the opportunity for the project proponents to provide information to the public and have this feedback. This is not a public hearing. A public hearing is now the requirement of the department to have this same consultation between the public and the Department of the Environment, that is determined based on the public’s interest.” Gordon explained, adding that this was his personal understanding of what is outlined in the legislation.

“Now I haven’t seen the petition or the signatures,” he went on to say,” But if it is that the questions were geared towards providing some information that could be deliberated on within the NEAC, the NEAC will make a recommendation to the DOE and say ‘listen, based on the amount of signatures that were presented to the government of behalf of this project, it is now that we need to conduct a public hearing which will then be between the Department and the public’,” Gordon said.

He said how that hearing is conducted would have to be determined, but suggested that a methodology like that of the FPIC protocol could possibly be utilized in order to have the voices of those who oppose the project heard.

Luis Munoz, the project lead, said that the only new component of this project since the 2021 rejection by the NEAC of a previous EIA submitted by the developers is that the proposed offshore dumping of dredged material was completely removed from this new EIA. They also inputted information that the DOE had indicated was missing from the previous EIA. In the recently submitted ESIA, it is being proposed that millions of cubic meters of the dredged material be placed in nearshore and onshore locations in the area of the port. The issue of placement of this material has been one of concern for Belize Water Services Limited, which had issued a statement last year which pointed out that the material would be dumped between its sewer ponds and on top of an important mangrove wetland used for daily treatment of about 1.6 million gallons of wastewater, which is then discharged through canals into the Caribbean Sea.

The letter, in addition to noting that the mangroves serve as a vital natural polisher that further treats effluent before it reaches the sea, stated that “BWS is greatly concerned by the developer’s proposal to dredge and to place 7.5 million cubic meters of dredged material between the location of BWS’s sewer ponds and the Caribbean Sea.”

“BWS anticipates a serious disruption of the established treatment process, as well as an increase in the challenges of meeting the regulated effluent limits for discharges from domestic wastewater treatment systems into Class 1 waters,” the company further said.

One of the project leads from Piedroba Consulting Group, Jelle Prins, claimed at the public consultation, however, that they have been in conversation with BWS for nearly 8 months.  

“We are currently talking to them and executing the drafting of a memorandum of association that defines the relationship going forward, that ensures that we as a developer will not interfere with the treatment process and the outflow, and I think they’re satisfied with the direction that we’ve taken,” Prins said. However, BWS has made no indication of a change in its position or mentioned any talks currently ongoing with the developers.

Last week, Minister of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, Hon. Orlando Habet mentioned that the law was silent on the matter of the resubmission of an EIA, and the environmental officers at the session stated something similar—explaining that because the laws of the country do not explicitly prohibit such a resubmission, they accepted the new submission from Waterloo after the rejection of its 2019 EIA.

Munoz in his remarks confirmed that what has been submitted is a new EIA. He stated, “The EIA process that we are sitting with today is an iteration of several different processes. The first EIA was submitted in 2020; we went through a public consultation and on the basis of that public consultation and generally listening to the public we eventually changed one element of the EIA, which was the removal of the offshore placement of dredged material, and we resubmitted that as an addendum to the EIA one. That addendum was publicly heard almost exactly a year ago. We went through the NEAC process … various requests were made by the NEAC to clarify certain points, and we felt that we answered those. The NEAC felt that we didn’t, but ultimately, based on our conversations with the DOE and a number of different consultations with the DOE, it was concluded that the most appropriate process was to submit a third stand-alone EIA that combines all those different elements in a single document.”

Prime Minister Hon. John Briceño had suggested that this new EIA was a part of an ongoing process, but the DOE representative confirmed that what was submitted is a new EIA. As a result, this EIA appears to be subject to the stipulations laid out in the Blue Bond agreement signed in late 2021, which requires that all EIAs be paused until the regulations governing the process are updated and improved.

Environmental Officer Kenrick Gordon explained, “This EIA, the 2022 EIA, is a new EIA that is submitted to the department. The previous EIA that was submitted in 2019, we’ve considered that process closed. The developers and the project components had decided to put the tribunal process a stay; however, the law is silent when it comes to the resubmission of a project, so they decided to submit this new EIA to the department, and in doing so we took them through the process. What we felt is that considering the previous EIA had lacked that information, the department had closed the first EIA process. We made the decision that we were going to incorporate those in this new EIA terms of reference, and at this point, we felt that the information in regards to the request made by the department has been incorporated in this EIA, and now we take it to the NEAC to see if, in fact, they did address all those issues.”

We will have more on the public consultation in the upcoming weekend issue. 

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