CIG and Dart still discussing failed dump deal
(CNS): Talks are continuing between the Cayman Islands Government and Dart over the failed dump deal, and it could be some time before the ministry is in a position to begin a new procurement process to find a suitable private sector entity to solve Cayman’s garbage crisis. The CIG has already wasted almost $16.5 million during the ReGen negotiations on consultants, insurance and project management.
However, Sustainability Minister Kathy Ebanks-Wilks told CNS that intense talks over the agreement are ongoing, even though she announced in July that the government was withdrawing from it.
At this stage, the sustainability ministry is expected to retain the waste-management problem in its portfolio once the government has cleared the legal, financial and other hurdles to extricate itself from what the minister and her predecessor, Wayne Panton, have both said was a bad deal. Given that ministry’s experience, it will take on the new procurement exercise, which is now unlikely to start before parliament is prorogued ahead of the 2025 General Election.
How much more the failed $1 billion deal will cost the public purse remains to be seen. However, according to the ministry’s response to a freedom of information request, $10 million alone had been spent on legal fees by the time the talks collapsed. Other costs associated with the project include the capping and remediation of a large part of the original landfill, which benefitted Dart as the surrounding land owner.
In addition, since the government began the original procurement exercise around seven years ago, there have been a number of land deals associated with the project. There were also general costs relating to the preparation of the project, which led to the Dart-led consortium securing the bid to build a new waste management and recycling centre, including the waste-to-energy plant, in 2017.
During a parliamentary meeting in July, Ebanks-Wilks finally confirmed that the marathon talks over this deal had collapsed as the proposed costs were too high. The UPM government, like PACT before it, said when it took over the negotiations that although the PPM-led administration signed an agreement in March 2021, just weeks before the election, the deal was far from complete and many elements of the project had not been settled.
After a further three years of negotiations between PACT/UPM and Dart, Sustainability Minister Katherine Ebanks-Wilks announced last month that the CIG had pulled the plug on the project, which she said was “untenable and unaffordable”.
“We need to find a more affordable option for the future,” Ebanks-Wilks said at the time as she warned the cost of the project could put CIG at risk of breaching the Framework for Fiscal Responsibility and losing control of the public finances to the UK. “This decision by Cabinet was not taken lightly,” she said.
Speaking to CNS on Thursday, Ebanks-Wilks said the government remained committed to finding a solution and would move towards the procurement process as soon as the talks to end the deal were over.
Since the announcement, a damning report by the Office of the Auditor General about the state of the deal as of early 2022 was leaked. The OAG had found that the negotiations between Dart and the government started badly and got progressively worse, even before the PPM-led administration signed a more than CI$1 billion preliminary deal with the islands’ wealthiest landowner.
At almost every turn officials made mistakes or failed to make the necessary reviews, calculations and assessments to protect the public purse.
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Category: Environmental Health, Health
Why so down on Dart? It looks like he takes $1,000,000 and turns it into $2,000,000. CIG Takes $100,000,000 and turns it into $10 for each voter and a little bit of road. What am I missing other than my $10? Honest question.
Dart is a self interested corporate predator that sucks the life out of Cayman.
No public contracts or concessions for this company ever.
And CIG is not?
quick, tell us what CIG is lmao
i feel like us get more from dart than cig lol we dont have to love all of it from dart cig gives nothing back lol
Because Dart is made up of outsiders lmao who have Dart profit lol at their best interest lol.
GIG is made up of outsiders too. The civil service has become overwhelmed. It is operated by, and for, people not from here.
The difference is that DART are brilliant and operates to benefit Cayman and thus increase the value of its assets and protect its investments.
CIG is inept, and the civil service is milking Cayman into oblivion.
If forced to choose between the two, I side with DART outsiders over CIG outsiders.
And actually more efficiently than Dart. Dart actually considers how it can make money; CIG simply takes it, distributes it to their families, cronies and bribees; and gets little done for the populace. But hey, they keep getting elected.
How is this Dart’s fault?
The responsibility for the dump lies squarely with the CIG Government!
Right. Camana Bay is just a dump like Treasure Island that Dart built to make a quick dollar and get out of here. On the contrary, Camana Bay raised the level of development and construction and created an incredible place for people to go and work and socialize. Everything Dart does is top quality, and if I were the CI government I would sign that contract in a second.
The disgraceful monument to Cayman Governmental incompetence lives on!
It started in September 2020 when Former Premier Alden McLaughlin and his entire Cabinet signed away Government’s last piece of waterfront land in the North Sound to Dart via the Land Transfer Agreeement.
This could have been dealt with 10+ years ago … but McLaughlin et al all stood on a ticket of ‘no dump for Bodden Town’.
It’s true to say that the remediation of the part of the landfill closest to the Esterley Tibbetts Highway has benefited Dart as the neighbouring landowner, but for goodness sakes, it certainly also benefited Seven Mile Beach and Grand Cayman generally. When the landfill had the worst of its fires just before the COVID lockdown, the smoke was in the air for miles away from the dump. Since Dart remediated that part of the landfill, there haven’t been any major fires. We should all be happy about that. So what if it also benefited Dart – at least it got done, which is something the CIG failed to do for years and years and years.
Let’s pretend that remediation doesn’t mean dumping dirt on top of the trash with no long term waste solution.
For all the time and money wasted, I don’t see why we should be grateful for half measures when the clock is ticking.
I hope you aren’t suggesting someone (Dart or whoever) should mine the dump to get rid of it. If so, then you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Capping and venting the mound might not be the only step that should be taken, but it should have always been the first step. And yes… it stopped the fires.
Say what you like about Dart – but one thing we can be sure of, is that he/they are competent.
And “competence” is a word that the CIG government knows absolutely nothing about…
Kenny and JunJu spent all the borrowed money Kathy. You and the others enabled them. That’s why we run the risk of falling foul of the FFR, not for any other reason.
“Given that ministry’s experience, it will take on the new procurement exercise, which is now unlikely to start before parliament is prorogued ahead of the 2025 General Election.”
This has literally been the MO since I was born in 1980.
World Class Sh*t Show.
The only recycling program that Cayman has down pact is that of our politicians. Same sh*t. Different day.
Insanity.
in dart i trust.
cig are fools who cannot even run a parking ticket machine properly.
# WorldClass.
So it was still value for money then, they just couldn’t afford it. At least that’s what the article implies.
No. Instead of lowering costs through energy fuel savings, their WTE proposal was going to more than double CUC energy prices for all consumers from $0.14 to somewhere north of $0.40/KWh, each “committed partner” taking a slice out of us along the way.
….currently – all in (total of all CUC costs, fees, (sur)charges etc, divided by my KW usage), my CUC bill, per month is in the range of $0.32- $0.34 per kw…..not sure where 14 cents comes from?
But what I am SURE of is that:
We need NET METERING and we need it NOW!
Net metering is being abandoned in many places as it credits small producers more than their fair share and pushes costs to the remainder of consumers. Bad deal, there are better ways.
So CUC was holding the country ransom then. Again.
Sandra, what are your thoughts?
She’s waiting to see who will pay her the most before she is told what her thoughts are.
It is going to cost another 10M+ to untangle the deal and pay for breach of NDA’s by CIG (due to leak of AG’s report containing confidential information).
How come there is no investigation into the leak? …this is a breach of the Official Secrets Act (which applies in Cayman).
The CIG needs to reject developer economic coercion strategies, abandon tired policies favoring environmental degradation, and deliver the service quality the public are already paying dearly for. Barge the landfill to Honduras, they already owe us.
“CIG needs to reject developer economic coercion strategies”
They would be totally and completely lost and this place would have gone down the toilet a lot sooner than the current rate that it is.
The problem is that there is an opportunity cost associated with not doing anything. Every year that this problem is not solved Cayman loses money because of the negative effects of having a gigantic mountain of trash. And, this cost just increases over time. Dart is the logical choice to do this, as he has a vested interest in getting rid of the dump to increase the value of Camana Bay. However, he is unlikely to take a loss on the project. The likelihood that it is a “bad deal” is laughable. The government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on enterprises that lose money like the turtle farm and Cayman airways. The government should stop hemming and hawing and just sign the contract and get going with it. If it is a billion dollars today, the cost is going to be one and a half billion in ten years, so there is no point in delaying.
Dart is only acting as a middleman, just hire a real company to get it done. But guess then their wouldn’t be perks for the high ups who will have their hands in the purse.
Spoken like a true Dart employee – thank you for nothing.
DART have no vested interest in providing us with a good deal, or even one in their own self interest – they are international vulture capitalists, not WTE experts, or an environmental NGO. The DART family is better known for their legacy landfill contamination from a century of chemical product discards. They are not in the cleanup business anywhere. Can’t even clean and maintain their own properties in Cayman.
Wheelabrator guy has entered the chat.
You still not getting the contract bruh.
Spending more money to get less done. Caymanian leadership. Perfect.
# WorldClass.
DART are international vulture capitalists, not a philanthropic NGO. Their proposal rigged the process to be a cash cow for them. PPM should never have awarded it in the first place. How and why it was should be an ACC file.
Why – because it is a sweetheart deal for Dart who will just hire some company from the USA to come do the job. All DECCO does is put dead overloaded staff on the job to claim loads of cash for themselves.
“All DECCO does is put dead overloaded staff on the job”
No they don’t…they sub-contract all the work out to other Companies, whether local or foreign.
What does it say about civil service competence and DEH management that we must source a private entity to do their job for them? Why should we accept that we always have to pay twice, or more? Will we ever be able to do the job?
Well, there are a couple of issues with that. First, Civil Servants were not hired for their skills in negotiating with highly paid international lawyers, financial wizards, lipsticking pig experts, etc. Even top of the scale Civil Servants are nowhere near real world money. We have to be thankful for the competent few who continue to do it out of a sense of duty.
Secondly, the Ministers have an obligation to all of the people who provided the money they handed out to their supporters to buy their votes.
If politicians use Civil Servants to do the jobs they have been handing out to consultants and cronies, then the Circle of Life would be broken. Nobody wants that to happen.
Don’t worry, they will make sure boss hog gets this job at whatever cost they want. The government at this stage is just a puppet for whatever big daddy says. They will be bringing in all kinds of companies from overseas with claims that no one on island is capable. What a waste of tax dollars and our environment as other places (like South Florida) gets these things done in way less time and without having to dance to Dart’s music.
Dart has the overloaded staff to suck loads of money out of the job plus they will just hire some company from overseas to do the actual work anyway. What a waste of our tax dollars but guess Dart has all the people in high places snowed, so government will just say”yes daddy it feels real good”.
Sorting out this project is far more important than any cruise piers. If there is money to build a dock (which we don’t need), surely those funds should be allocated to sort out the biggest problem in Cayman!
Couldn’t agree more. How about the referendum question ‘which should we build, #1 a cruise dock or #2 a waste to energy incinerator?’
Given that Mt Trashmore is the No.1 attraction for all cruise passengers balconies or upper decks when every single Cruise Ship enters our waters from 12 miles out…..giving them a pier would mean they could literally taste the air when they pull up.
Well said. The rubbish problem in Cayman is a far more pressing issue to those people who live here and a better use of public money than a cruise pier.
Hang tight, coming soon to a neighborhood near you…