Hew admits dump contract needed work
(CNS): Deputy Opposition Leader Joey Hew (GTN) has accused Premier Wayne Panton of manufacturing claims about the previous government’s deal regarding the dump, which was signed just weeks before the general election in 2022. In a long statement, Hew claimed the delay in relation to the ReGen waste management project should be blamed on Panton, but he admitted that the contract signed between the PPM-led administration and the Dart Group was not a complete agreement.
“We have never said there was a ‘fully negotiated contract’ that PACT could get on and execute as the premier claims,” Hew stated. “Presumably, the premier has forgotten that a member of his government, MP Dwayne Seymour, was minister responsible for the project at the time of the signing and he could have checked with him.”
Hew maintained he knew nothing about a review of the project by Auditor General Sue Winspear, who found that the deal the PPM signed did not represent value for money.
“We have not seen that report, so it is difficult to comment in detail. The leader of the opposition will ask for a copy since it has been brought up by the premier,” Hew said. “However, as well as our own Cayman Island Government financial experts, we retained world-leading external financial expert advisors to make sure that the contract being negotiated was appropriate in protecting the financial best interests of our country. I must stress that those financial advisors signed off on the decision to move to the signing of the project agreement in March 2021.”
CNS understands that the PPM relied heavily on the costly private sector consultants rather than the civil servants in the finance ministry. Hew said the Central Tenders Committee was kept involved in the process and that the negotiations “showed Decco/Dart was not seeking to make any excess profits and their proposed returns were in line with industry norms”.
The project is expected to cost in excess of $200 million and the premier has repeatedly stated that it has stalled not because the government is dragging its feet but because of myriad concerns with the details of the contract and what Panton has said are significant gaps.
The Progressives were also criticised for signing the deal very close to an election and were accused of using it as a campaign publicity stunt ahead of the ballot rather than having a real deal, given the numerous elements of the project that were, and still are, far from settled.
While Dart has focused entirely on capping the main landfill, which has been a goal of the corporation almost since it bought the land at Camana Bay, few other details relating to the broader project have been settled. Unknowns include how much CUC will pay for the power generated in the waste-to-energy facility and if there will be kerbside collection of recycling.
Shortly after assuming office, Panton warned that there were a number of issues that needed to be addressed before the government could move ahead with the main agreement. However, Hew has claimed that the PPM had done all of the heavy lifting on the contract. He said the current government “essentially did nothing” and the premier’s dithering was delaying the project.
See Hew’s statement in full below:
- Fascinated
- Happy
- Sad
- Angry
- Bored
- Afraid
Category: Environmental Health, Health
Hew’s party-aligned approved two tunnels to nowhere for this developer, and without a development plan, timeline, or benefit statement for the people of Cayman. Not coincidentally, we keep hearing murmuring from their tent about 50 story high rises.
Joey,really? blaming it on John John now..Lord help us with this PPM bunch..
Joey, you know better than blaming Jon Jon. You and Alden outwitted poor Jon Jon into signing a bad deal to appease Dart.
Still not a word on territorywise Waste Management Plan.
Wayne’s master plan appears to be to expand the landfill on to and across the ETH. Won’t be long now.
PPM seem to forget that they had YEARS to deal with this and did nothing but sit on their thumb until the last few months before the election. Saddling us with a rushed contract that could very well screw Cayman over again by outsourcing our decision-making processes and by extension – our power and agency to A private entity that already holds WAY too much power and influence over our society and institutions.
Rushing through this deal to vulture DART (funnily enough an initial producer of a lot of the crap that makes up Mt Trashmore) to become a controller of Caymanian energy supply by burning plastic and think they can squak about how this administration is taking too long to finish up their crappily drafted ‘deal’.
It’s utterly ridiculous, PPM and UDP already signed so many crappy deals with Dart now they want us to take on another one for their plastic producing overlords. Good on the PACT government for not rushing headlong and good on anyone who can see through this utterly ridiculous pigeon-chesting performative outrage from the Powerless Performative Moaners.
It makes me wonder if there are any honest people in the parliament.
Please let us know if you find any.
Please define “honest”.
It seems that anyone dealing with Dart may not be trustworthy. I don’t think he should be trusted in ANY negotiations.
Put a period at the end of Dart’s Mount Trashmore deal and tear up the rest. Rebid the waste to energy plant with companies who are actually in the waste to energy business. This is only hard if you make it hard. Dart wants an open ended deal because they have no idea how to do this themselves and no clue how much it will cost them to hire other people to do it.
we will not get anywhere until we first admit that:
there is no one in cig or the civil service with the expertise to negotiate a contract of this scope.
CIG never deals with the top companies in whatever industry they need for a job. It’s always some consortium/partnership created just for the job, with big local interests, who have to subcontract all the actual work because they don’t have any experience or knowledge themselves. It’s all legal but obviously corrupt.
Typical for the Cayman Islands, wouldn’t you say?
Standard Cayman
PPM the best at throwing shade and blame!
Dart are long presumed to have a vested interest as a proximal business stakeholder, but when you read their agreements it becomes clear very quickly how adversarial and greedy their ambitions actually are. PPM had trouble reading so many of these documents before signing them on our behalf in the past, gifting away large tracks of crown land, and not noticing conditional commitment negating clauses, or bothering to keep track of performance deadlines and limited duty waivers. Joey had lots of time to read these before his Cabinets signed them.
Citations?
4 versions of NRA Agreement for starters
Weak effort, do try a little harder.
So what you are saying is that Dart did not get what they asked for, different elected officials wanted changes, which were all accepted by Dart, who ultimately delivered that for which they were asked. Sounds to me like a “negotiation” of sorts.
Dart did not complete delivery of their obligations to CI people from 2016, now over 6yrs ago. CIG (PPM) did not supervise satisfaction of NRA terms of reference, and other agreement conditions, and is still not keeping track of their limited embedded duty waivers that were capped at $30mln.
Dart are in the debt-trap vulture capitalism business, with a poor track record. They are not an international waste management company and can’t offer any in-house waste management expertise, so how did they win this contract? What were the criteria?
There’s no need for criteria when they own the country.
And when they created most of the rubbish. They invented stryrofoam
https://www.invent.org/inductees/otis-ray-mcintire#:~:text=Ray%20McIntire%20invented%20polystyrene%20foam,wind%2C%20rain%2C%20and%20moisture. LIAR
These idiots don’t believe facts unless they see it on TicToc or on a YouTube channel of a guy broadcasting from the basement of his parent’s house.
And penicillin.
They simply annoumced free handouts of carrots to donkeys.
In War and Peace the novelist Leo Tolstoy downplayed the role of human agency in shaping events .Tolstoy wrote that “A king is history’s slave. And ever since Thuycidides chronicled the Peloponnesisian War scholars have recognized that the weak cannot dictate terms to the strong.
In the sordid history of waste management on Grand Cayman ,few images are more iconic than those of the fires which raged on the dump for weeks some years ago. Moral clarity is not easy to come by ,but any resident who is sane and observant will realize that over the years political directorates have been bankrupt of ideas for effectively dealing with waste management in these islands.
As if that were not challenge enough ,we continue to build on every available speck of land to the detriment of the natural environment and the exclusion of large cohorts of our populace . It is madness…sheer utter insanity .and what is more …it is unsustainable.
We have not heeded the lessons of history and as is now obvious by what is happening along some sections of the ‘once existing’ Seven Mile Beach we have ‘flown in the face of nature’. The landfill is ‘a ticking time bomb’and my heart goes out to all those people in its close proximity.
As I have often said ,as development goes in this jurisdiction ,”wev have sown the wind .And as any biblical scholar will know .if you so`w the ,”you shall reap the whirlwind.”
What did you do to address the situation when you had the opportunity?
Mr Roy.
Did history teach us how to pay our bills without working for our money.?
Cayman is trapped , it has to keep producing income to provide govt services.
Without direct income taxation there is no choice.
Righ, because a billion dollars a year in revenue isn’t enough to pay for anything we’d ever need.
I’m always left shaking my head whenever I read one of Roy Bodden’s utterances. He’s clearly forgotten he spent 16 and a half years in the Legislative Assembly, including 4 and a half years as a minister in the UDP government. It’s one thing to condemn previous administrations, but it is a bit rich for him not to acknowledge the role he played or didn’t play, as the case maybe, in the failure to plan properly for Cayman’s inevitable development.
Not a peep about the reason for gaps or lack of details from the PPM that signed an agreement. Mr. Hew is out of his depth again sounding like dart’s parrot. This waste management project lost its way after both heads of the PM office died suddenly (Jim Scott and then Peter Ranger). Until these fine gentlemen are replaced with qualified Project Managers, we will continue to see problems remaining on budget, scope of works and on time. Jennifer Ahearn is not the solution but PPM negotiated a bad deal for Cayman.
Putting lipstick on a pig?
Anyone sees occupational safety violations?
he says, she says…..
And don’t forget about the starfish navigation system
do-nothing-ppm….or no-plan-pact? …why is anybody surprised?
PACT & CI Govt at sixes & sevens, embodying evolution. Now to be, ‘at twelves & fourteens’
When private sector companies get involved in government projects this is what happens.
However the FFR requires outside legal and financial advice.
Give control back to civil servants and these things won’t happen.
This is completely untrue. Quite the opposite.
Yah, The civil service has been dragging us down for many years.
It appears that it will go on forever.
You’re right. Nothing will get done.
Give control back to civil servants and the same will happen as has happened over the last 30 years, nothing!
Still laughing six hours later.
The civil service is broken plus an expensive mess. They have the budget to fix what they deem is a priority. Leadership has failed Cayman badly all we get are more excuses and expensive mistakes. civil servants making big decisions are not competent nor held accountable. The buck stops at the top!
Correct, it will never happen. Which is precisely how we got in this mess in the first place.
Y’all had 40 years. The resulting shit heap speaks for itself.
Just write a contract to Dart. This is all it needs to say. Dart corp can deal with this send us a bill. Then it will be done. Organized by a group of people with a clue. Because what’s going on proves no one now or before has a sniff what’s going on.
Hew is a joker, about doing all the heavy lifting on the contract. Maybe he was talking about lifting knife and fork at contract lunch meetings? Brawn I can however believe more since between the two, Hew & Seymour I can’t see enough brains to warrant tackling anything like a heavy negotiation.
Dart pay Campbells to write and negotiate both sides of their contracts, vesting always for Dart.
$200M = $400M++ at project close out. I wonder if the current Auditor General will still be here to audit the contract upon completion?
The $10mln dump re-lining that no previous PPM gov’t could administer, is now a $400mln debt-trap marriage with their preferred developer – who offers no in-house waste management expertise, and lack plans for their own eye-sore/stagnant property holdings. Great job everybody.
Just fix the damn dump.
PPM had 12+ years
Ditherin Wayne, sounds about right
Dithering your asquaresus partner. People like you obviously envy him and all your little pea brain “Sir” can do is call him names. As to the pup squeak Joey H you know the truth don’t you, but I bet you too scared to tell what you all negotiated and for whom . When do you start your consultancy like the once fearless leader of the PPM.
says the man who called two people names in his post. really Joshua
This is quite a dithering response. What exactly are you trying to say?
Wayne and D-Wayne, Dumb and Dumber.