Panton says Opposition painted an inaccurate picture of waste project Loop Cayman Islands
Black Immigrant Daily News
In a debate in the Parliament on October 10, Premier Wayne Panton suggested that members of the Opposition misled the public by presenting the waste to energy facility as a project that was ready for construction. The real story, according to Panton, was that many items remained outstanding at the time that the Opposition signed the contract for the facility three weeks before the 2021 general elections.
As he explained the complications, Panton noted that he and his PACT team initially discovered the scope of the problems in a report that was prepared by the government’s legal advisors in August 2021.
He noted that the report, spanning nearly 40 pages, “gave an overview of the outstanding items to financial close, the vast majority of which were shown as not yet agreed… and there were significant issues to be addressed.”
Panton placed significant emphasis on what remained to be done, highlighting that the report set out “page after page after page of outstanding items that still needed to be negotiated and agreed.”
Due to the number of unaddressed matters, Panton suggested that, “perhaps the Opposition did not fully appreciate what they had approved” i.e., it was actually “a highly complex project”.
Panton then intimated that the Opposition’s failure to deal with the outstanding matters associated with the contract was likely due to the Opposition being “quite busy at the time campaigning for re-election at the time they approved it and signed it.”
While the general public remained unaware of these issues, Panton said that the Opposition celebrated the contractual signing “as a crowning achievement of their administration.”
Notwithstanding the “fanfare” (as Panton called it), what the Opposition envisioned as “a financial close target date of September 30th, 2021” was actually unrealistic given the number of outstanding items.
He said:
It is my opinion Mister Speaker that there is simply quite simply no way that the project agreement that was signed could reach financial close in the time frame that had been projected or promoted last year (not unless one or both parties agreed to make concessions on some key points immediately without taking into account the best interests of their side , concessions that would run the life of the contract and quite possibly concessions that the people in the Cayman Islands would quite literally be paying for over a 25-year period of the system being in operation).
Panton also noted that an essential component of the project was missing. More specifically, the project plans did not include an allocation of space for the Department of Environmental Health to continue their solid waste operations.
He said:
The fact that this was an essential component that was missing… the project agreement required for the Department of Environmental Health to be relocated on a time frame, that much like their projected financial close date would be nigh impossible to achieve. Interesting coming from an Opposition that claims to be highly competent.
Panton emphasized that, given all of the issues, what had been left for the PACT government to consider “was not a project that was ready to move to construction” and he expressed his view that it was “unfortunate that it has been presented to the public in that way over the past year.”
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