The Tribune

NASSAU needs a mayor. We have beat around the bush long enough and pretended that somehow this historic city could just run itself. We should have known better. Its majestic Madeira trees are suffering.

Its signage is out of control. Its streets are dirty, its nightlife non-existent. Volunteer efforts like the Downtown Nassau Partnership and before that the Nassau Tourism and Development Board and even before that the Bahamas Duty Free Promotion Board have all been valiant, each holding back the oncoming tide of neglect despite lack of taxing powers or official authority.

But preserving a destination rich in history with architectural treasures and sites that date back more than 200 years, creating an experience that locals and visitors enjoy and providing a clean, safe environment that invites a residential population bringing new life and vitality to the city cannot be achieved when the major means to raise revenue is by begging.

And that is precisely what the case has been for too long. New lighting? Ask government.

If government doesn’t have the funds, go to the merchants, the same merchants who have been forking out and handing over dollars since the serious (organized) begging began 25 years ago and the casual farther back.

New sidewalks? Same story. Overall plan? None.

No government has had the courage to relinquish partial control over the most populated city in the nation, the one that generates revenue that flows into the Consolidated Fund and out again to areas that contribute less and whose per capita needs are more costly. So the city pays and the price it pays is its own neglect.

Let us say it again, Nassau needs a mayor and a city manager.

At a Bahamas Chamber of Commerce Meet the Minister breakfast last week, Minister of Tourism Dionisio D’Aguilar detailed the economic impact of the country’s 6.2 million visitors, noting that the 4.6 million who are cruise passengers only account for 12% of the spend. Those same passengers spend twice as much in St. Marten so you cannot blame it on the type of passenger. What is it that a port like St. Marten has that Nassau does not? Organisation, clear signage, wide sidewalks between the shops in the artificially created port village and easy onshore booking of excursions, clean restrooms. We have been there and we still believe that Nassau’s potential far outweighs our competitors who cannot hold a candle to us in originality.

Yet the spend is twice. We have done this to ourselves.

There is too little to do, too little variety to shop for, too few conveniences, including restrooms and far too few experiences that are uniquely Bahamian.

In their daily newsletters to passengers, some ships warn of Nassau’s dangers.

In their port lectures which are not billed as paid advertising when parts of them should be, but passed off as helpful advice and counseling from those who spend their lives going from port to port, passengers are told to shop at only certain stores if they want to be sure that their purchases are authentic and the jewels are what they purport to be.

One visitor told us just this week that he was approached four times to buy drugs by the time he got to Bay Street from Prince George Wharf.

And no one is able to get a handle on all that is happening in or to historic Nassau because no one is in charge and no management takes responsibility because as hard as they try, they have no authority.

The Port Department controls one area but if there is a faulty electrical issue as there has been in the past and a long power cord is lying in the water in a trench that passengers have to cross in the pouring rain, someone has to notify the Ministry of Works and BPL. The surrey horses, the subject of another day’s opinion piece, fall under yet another ministry and when Tourism police were asked recently why they did not enforce the two-hour rest period in the middle of the day when it was clearly being violated one officer said they knew about the requirement but it wasn’t their job because it did not fall under the Ministry of National Security. Environmental Health has trash collection responsibility and the regulation of signage or lack thereof is the responsibility of the Department of Physical Planning.

No one has overall responsibility for the City of Nassau and Tourism feels the brunt.

More importantly, we as Bahamians are sitting idly by hoping someone will do something as we watch a town that should fill us with pride slam us with shame instead.

Minister D’Aguilar was asked at that same breakfast if he would open a Super Wash without a manager in place. The question was polite and rhetoric. No one opens without a manager, no mom and pop shop over the hill, and yet we open the city of Nassau every day to thousands and by the end of the year to more than 4 million people without a manager.

Lost Springs, Wyoming, population 4, has a mayor and back when it had a population of 11 a few years ago, that same mayor took a case to court against a railroad company that wanted to use land that would have cut the city off from traffic, and that mayor won the case.

The railway had to use other land. Without Mayor Leda Price and her determination to succeed on behalf of a handful of people who believed in their right to preserve what was theirs, the city of Lost Springs might have lived up to its name and been lost to all but history.

Monowi, Nebraska, population 1 as of the 2010 Census, has a mayor. She is the sole citizen of that township. She pays her liquor license taxes and submits a municipal road report annually to get the funding to keep her four street lights lit.

A town of one with a mayor.

We believe that Minister D’Aguilar will bring a refreshing approach to Tourism.

Coming from a business background with a degree in Accounting as well as having held the chairmanship of the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and turning a Laundromat business into a national success story, he has already dissected and studied visitor numbers and expectations.

He knows that visitors do not post about a nice hotel room where the air conditioning works.

They want experiences they will cherish and that make them want to return to that destination and to refer others.

If a township with one can have a mayor who pays taxes and a city of 11 can have a mayor that wins a case against a powerful railroad, is it not time for The Bahamas to acknowledge Nassau needs a mayor?

We think so and we urge this government to be the one that shows the courage to create a new paradigm in governance.