The Tribune

By LARRY SMITH

GREAT HARBOUR CAY, the Berry Islands -- “I call it the knowing. I know what’s going to happen,” 58-year-old Craig Wells confided to me from beneath a raggedy straw hat at the dilapidated beach bar here, just across from the airport terminal.

“I knew someone was coming to meet me today because I saw the spider last night.”

Craig is the son of one of the first real estate salesmen brought to the island by Great Harbour Cay developer Lou Chesler in the halcyon years of this once spectacular resort community. He arrived at the age of 16 with his father, a Long Islander who passed away in the 1980s - at about the same time that the development failed. But Craig never left.

When he is not spearfishing, or playing petanque at the beach bar, Craig whittles away the time at Harold Christie’s original 1960s beach house, an appropriately rustic shack set in a grove of tall casuarinas that are spectacularly adorned with the flotsam and jetsam of years of eclectic beach combing.

It was arch realtor Christie who introduced Chesler to the Berry Islands after the Canadian entrepeneur fell out with Freeport founder Wallace Groves. In 1960 Chesler was a successful land developer brought in by Groves to spearhead resort activities on Grand Bahama.

But according to architect Peter Barratt, Freeport’s retired town planner, Groves and Chesler didn’t get on, and in the mid-1960s Chesler received a $17 million payout and began searching for other opportunities.

“I remember him storming out of a meeting with Groves late one Saturday morning after they had a falling out,” Barratt told me. “Chesler made a packet in Freeport and with the spare cash decided to invest it back in the islands.”

Meanwhile, Christie had been busily acquiring property ever since the 1930s, becoming the most successful land promoter in the country. In fact, he was at least partly responsible for almost every major development that took place in the Bahamas until his death in 1973 on a European promotional tour.

The Berry Islands had been sparsely settled by freed slaves after 1835. Great Harbour Cay is the most northerly and the largest of these cays, and Christie had acquired most of it by the time Chesler was looking for something to do with his money.

Aside from the tiny Bullock’s Harbour settlement there was nothing on the seven-mile-long island when Chesler bought it, except an airstrip that Christie had built to fly in prospects. Chesler master-planned the entire resort community - golf course, clubhouse, airport, marina, beach and sailing club, villas, home lots, roads and utilities.

He also contracted a renowned celebrity promoter named Earl Blackwell to organise the exclusive Tamboo Club as a marketing vehicle. Tamboo’s board included bigwigs like the Marquess of Blandford, Cary Grant, George Plimpton and Walter Cronkite. Tamboo is still there - it was kept alive for years as a dinner club - but is now closed.

Other luminaries in the cay’s early days included Brigitte Bardot, Jack Nicklaus, Joe Namath, Ingrid Bergman, and the Rockefellers. The entire island “was conceived as a complete sports/social complex.” Bullock’s Harbour, the only local settlement, had its own dock and was reached by a bridge across a dredged channel.

Blackwell’s beachfront home is now a restaurant and small hotel called CarriEarl, operated by a cheerful British couple from Manchester - Marty Dronsfield, a former restauranteur, and Angie Jackson, a retired British Airways flight attendant. They serve up hog fish and lamb chop dinners washed down with fine wine to some 140 second home families, while a couple of snack bars near the marina and in the settlement offer more casual fare.

Today, Great Harbour Cay is just a shadow of its original glory. The decline began with the economic recession sparked by the 1973 arab oil embargo, which pushed up interest rates to almost 20%. And the Pindling government’s nationalistic policies at the time were considered unfriendly and turned off many potential homebuyers and investors.

Some argue that Chesler wasn’t in control of the resort’s high-spending finances. Others suggest that despite the surge in sales of prime beach lots, not enough actual homes were built to support the scale and cost of the island’s facilities and infrastructure.

Whatever the reason, after 1975 Chesler abandoned the project, which was millions in debt, and it went through a series of ineffective and under-financed operators. It declined further as the Bahamian economy shifted to cocaine smuggling in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Both the young men from Bullock’s Harbour, as well as celebrity homeowners like powerboat racer George Morales, were heavily involved in the drug trade at the time.

There were hopes that the slide would be reversed when a Florida realtor named Tirrel Fender acquired the bankrupt resort’s assets in the early 1990s, and signed a heads of agreement that included tax concessions as well as a Crown grant of several uninhabited cays and hundreds of acres of mangroves - areas of incalculable cultural and ecological value to the Berries.

In the agreement, the Fenders undertook to “proceed forthwith and pursue bona fide in a diligent manner” the redevelopment of the ruined clubhouse, the dilapidated airport and phase two of the resort’s master plan. And the government could retake any part of the resort not yet conveyed if these obligations were not met within five years.

“Everyone was very excited at this,” longtime homeowner William Kalis, whose family came here from Holland in 1971, told me recently. “Locals and second home owners alike were hopeful that the promise of the original development would be revived, and the great potential of the island realized. There was no enthusiasm about the prospect of filling in the mangroves, but that possibility was much further down the road.”

Unfortunately, nothing happened. And the heads of agreement was revoked by the government in the late 1990s, after the airport was declared unsafe and complaints about the impassable roads had reached a crescendo. The government took over the airport and fixed the runway, a deal was made with property taxes to pave the roads, and the sporadic water supply to Bullock’s Harbour was rehabilitated. BEC had taken over the power plant even earlier.

But the Fenders still own about a thousand unsold lots, a 10-acre hotel site, the 80-slip marina, the golf course (which is maintained by the homeowners themselves), the dilapidated beach club, the roads, the poorly-maintained water utility, the monopoly fuel concession, and two blocks of rundown apartments.

According to Chief Councillor Lawrence Rolle, who operates the settlement’s main grocery store, bar and restaurant, apart from a few local businesses like his, the island’s economy relies on home construction and the wages provided by the cruise lines that operate two nearby cays as private beach resorts for their passengers. Rolle identified two factors that are restraining the economy.

“Since we have no on-island administrator everything has to go through North Andros, and it is difficult to get things done through central government,” he said. “And the Fenders control the marina and the fuel concession, but they take more out than they put in so we are often out of fuel for as long as a week. In my opinion they have been holding the island at bay for more than 20 years. They are certainly not developers - I have more staff than they do.”

Gary Grant and Linkwood Ferguson, of the island’s recently formed Concerned Citizens Committee, agree. They want the government to help remove these bottlenecks: “We are serious about infrastructure. We need a new public dock, a bank, an administrator, a resident doctor and a better clinic. The water supply is undrinkable - we have to import bottled water - and something needs to be done with the dump,” Grant told me.

The dump on Great Harbour Cay is a thing to behold. A half-mile stretch of dirt road just off the golf course intersecting piles of burning garbage and rusting cars and appliances. The site is one of 10 sanitary landfills on various islands that were supposed to have been built with a $10 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank awarded in 1998. It is now an environmental disaster, within a hundred yards of the well field where water for the settlement is drawn.

Meanwhile, the government collects some $2 million a year in departure taxes from the cruise ships that operate the nearby cays, as well as about half a million in import taxes, Ferguson told me. Local government’s annual budget is about $150,000, most of which goes to wages and maintenance. But the government also provides a Police, Customs and Immigration presence, and operates a clinic with two nurses.

Representatives of the Concerned Citizens Committee recently met with State Minister for Investments Khaalis Rolle in Nassau to plead their case. And the Fenders are said to be touting a new proposal for the island’s redevelopment - although they did not respond (through their lawyer) to my request for an interview.

In William Kalis’ view, the Fenders are speculators. “This is why a friendly community with priceless natural resources, proximity to the US, a highly desirable climate, a port of entry, political stability and strong property rights has been unable to leverage these assets for the benefit of citizens.”

Kalis is a full-time resident on the cay and president of the Berry Islands Trust, an association of Bahamian and expatriate homeowners and other stakeholders who seek to promote community life and sustainable development on Great Harbour Cay.

Earl Deveaux, the retired cabinet minister who represented the Berry Islands from 1997 to 2002, told me the issue for the government is one of eminent domain - the repossession of private assets in the public interest. “When I was in office we decided not to allow the Fenders to sell or mortgage any of their cays because they had failed, after five years, to live up to the terms of the heads of agreement. They were little more than slumlords.”

And Terrence Winder, a top local contractor who is also vice president of the Berry Islands Trust, said it is time for the government to intervene again: “The Fenders have done nothing over more than 20 years, and they should not be permitted to continue to hold this community hostage. It must be possible to move them on, and see if something else will work.”

In Kalis’ view, The Bahamas is a high-cost country and the out islands in particular are unsuitable for low-end tourism, which cannot produce the income to support a local community. “But there are some one million households in the US with a net worth over $5 million. We should be directly targeting these folks. This is not an elitist approach, it is an economic fact of life. If we want an attractive community it has to be paid for.”

And if the Fenders won’t invest in Great Harbour Cay, Kalis suggests that homeowners may be prepared to cover their back taxes in return for the assets. Land could then be gifted to the government for housing and other facilities, including a new public dock, since the existing settlement dock is in disrepair and has no room for expansion.

“After all these years it is evident that a commercial tourist project is simply not going to happen, but there is no reason why current development of second homes cannot continue to reach a level in 10 or 15 years that would result in an economically viable community as long as the infrastructure is properly maintained,” Kalis said.

“The Fenders talk the talk knowing that every day they can stay here increases their chance of eventually getting the price they want for their assets,” he said. “There is little cost to themselves, but the victims of their unsuccessful efforts are the country and the families who try to make a living here. Their rights should be considered too.”

As Kalis spoke we gazed at a block of dirty apartments owned by the Fenders just off the golf course. A derelict swimming pool is filled with trash and rubble, children play on upstairs balconies with no railings, and near the front steps is an open sewer. It is time to leave.

Back at the beach bar near the airport, Craig Wells’ conversation switches from the marine environment to a religious fundamentalism that is difficult to pin down. He has been a fixture here for a long time, but his claim to prophecy failed when I asked what would happen to the resort. “Well I ain’t much of a people person,” he said with a smile. “But I can take you diving.”

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