The Tribune

When a road floods in Grand Bahama, the person standing in the water should not have to settle a jurisdictional dispute before somebody comes to clear the drain.

It is worth keeping that road in mind when reading the Government’s Green Paper, Grand Bahama: A Framework for Stability and Growth. Under the proposed arrangements, who would have the authority to act, the money to get the work done and the duty to explain a delay?

Public consultation opened on November 1. Bahamians have until April 30, 2027, to respond to the paper’s 25 questions, with public meetings planned for Freeport, East Grand Bahama and West Grand Bahama. The paper is available at gbframework.com. We encourage Bahamians to read it, particularly those whose homes and livelihoods will be most directly affected by the decisions ahead.

Prime Minister Philip Davis has made his starting point clear. He intends to bring the Grand Bahama Port Authority’s present governing role in Freeport to an end. He has invited Grand Bahamians to help determine what replaces it, and his administration has pledged to respect lawful rights as it makes that change.

Much of the debate will understandably concern the powers the Port Authority stands to lose. Residents have an equally important question: what will they gain? Moving a responsibility from a private body to a public one may settle who holds authority on paper. It does not tell a resident how to get a problem fixed.

At each public meeting, officials could invite residents to name a road that floods and use it to explain how the proposal would work. Who takes the first call? Who can send a crew? If the drain needs replacing rather than clearing, who approves the expenditure? And if the road floods again after the work is done, who comes back to the community to explain why?

The answers may differ across the island. A Freeport shopkeeper needs to know who will renew a licence during the transition. A resident in East Grand Bahama may want to know how repairs in a smaller settlement will be weighed against more expensive work in the city. In West Grand Bahama, the concern may be simpler still: will someone nearby be able to make a decision, or will every request have to go to Freeport or Nassau?

One reason to hold meetings in all three places is to hear those differences. Anyone who has called three offices about the same problem knows something the authors of the Green Paper need to hear. No legal training is required to describe where the present arrangements have failed, or to point out something that works well enough to keep.

The Government deserves credit for putting its proposal before the public and allowing time for people to consider it. Its next obligation is to show what it has heard. When the White Paper is published, targeted for July 1, 2027, it should identify what changed because a resident spoke up and explain why other suggestions were declined. Someone who makes the effort to attend a meeting deserves to know what became of the point they raised.

Read the paper. Bring a question from your street, your settlement or your business. Ask officials to follow it all the way through to an answer. If the new arrangements are to serve the whole of Grand Bahama, then wherever a person lives on that island, they should know whom to call, who can act and who must answer when the work is left undone.