The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

The Grand Bahama Chamber of Commerce’s president said he will “not talk bad” about the island’s energy supplier despite its recent admonition from the deputy prime minister.

Gregory LaRoda, responding after K Peter Turnquest urged the Grand Bahama Power Company (GBPC) to do more in fulfilling its responsibilities, and to move faster in re-electrifying the island’s east end post-Dorian, said: “It is his constituency and he has to ‘make noise’, and I don’t want to contradict him, but let me say this: No matter what we do there is room to do more and faster.

“Now, on the extreme east end of the island, the power company has made it clear that they are not going to spend all the money, because almost all of the poles are down between Free Town and the extreme east of the island, which is like a 20-mile stretch, and it is going to cost a substantial investment to put that back.

“So, what the GBPC has asked the government to do - at least this is what the chief executive has told me - they have asked the government to give them an idea on which areas of the extreme east they are looking to focus on to repopulate people back in, and what they would do is look at alternative energy up there. They will look at maybe solar generation to supply power to those areas.”

Mr LaRoda added: “So I am hoping Mr Turnquest is OK with that position, and I think what he is probably more concerned about is the ‘east end proper’ of the island around the area of the Casuarina bridge; that area where there are some homes that are ready to be energised I guess.

“But the power company is waiting for more of them in a particular cluster to be ready to receive power before they focus full force on those areas. I think that’s the part he is concerned about, and that’s the part that he feels they can do better and in those areas I think there is room for some improvement.

“But I wouldn’t go out on a limb and talk bad about the power company in terms of them being slow to do that, because if we had all the utilities responding on the island like the power company did after all of the major hurricanes we had we would be in a much better shape than we are now,” the chamber chief continued.

“They did do a good job. But I think it was with that initial push where they had all that help in from Florida to get everyone up and running that has now, for the most part, been scaled back and gone because it is not necessary any more. So things are not happening as fast as it was immediately after the hurricane. I think that is what Mr Turnquest is still upset with and worried about.”

Mr LaRoda said Grand Bahama is ending the year on a positive with the reopening of Grand Bahama International Airport and resumption of international flights. “We had the airport opening for flights between Miami and Fort Lauderdale direct from Freeport,” he said. “Bahamasair is flying regular flights along with Silver Airways, and Sunwing Airlines brought in a flight last week from Canada, so we are slowly getting back up and running on that. But we don’t have too much control on when the other airlines will start.

“It would have been good if we could have had gotten some positive news on the Grand Lucayan before the end of the year. But this week is Christmas week, and I don’t expect much to happen during this week. But hopefully early in January, I would like to see us having an announcement on that saying that at least the government has an agreement with them (Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and ITM Group) in terms of the sale of that property, so we can start seeing some development around that. That would be good for jobs.”

Mr Laroda continued: “We did have an announcement with another store that actually opened back up, and is back up and running, Perfume de Paris, so that is good news again, especially during the holiday season. We are looking forward to more things like that.

When asked about the health of Christmas shopping, Mr LaRoda said: “I haven’t been just recently in the main shopping area to look at it in detail, but I know building material is still crowded, especially now that you have the total island basically VAT free and duty free, folks are taking advantage of that.

“So the building supplies stores on some materials can’t keep up with the demand, that’s like the Kelly’s (True Value Freeport Ltd), the Dolly Madison’s, Gold Rock, those types of people. So that part of shopping is pretty good. As a matter of fact, Kelly’s just opened their household items section of their store, a third of it.

“They completed repairs and stocked it out so you can get housewares and you can get toys. I was just there and there was quite a few people in there. So that side of it is up and running, so that’s good and they are still systematically bring their whole store back up and running. So that’s real good news as well.”