Welcome to BEST

The Bermuda Environmental and Sustainability Taskforce (BEST) are concerned more about what is omitted by the just-published SDO for Southlands than be what is contained.

The most serious omission is that of the impact of this development when added to next door Atlantic Ltd. Development. The people depend on the government to consider the combined effects of neighbouring developments. It is totally unacceptable for the government to treat these adjacent developments as though there is no interaction, no combined impacts: environmental, visual, on traffic, on power supply and prices, on housing availability and prices, and on the cultural integrity of the neighbourhood.

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On July 26, Environment Minister Neletha Butterfield headlined a twenty-minute television and radio broadcast that explained Special Development Orders (SDOs) and attempted to justify the issuance of an SDO for the proposed hotel at Southlands. The Bermuda Environmental and Sustainability Taskforce (BEST) believes the Minister and her Cabinet colleagues failed in this attempt. In our view, the approval of this project denigrates the planning system and reduces sustainable development concerns to irrelevance. It discounts public opinion in favour of political ends. It negatively impacts the environment, coastline and, most importantly, generations to come. It creates significant precedence for use of public lands by private developers.

Minister Butterfield described SDOs as an important tool used for responding to strategic, national issues and the development needs of the day. The Government has not shown that this particular hotel is strategic or of national importance. Bermuda’s economy is booming, prices for housing are rising out of reach of the average Bermudian, inflation is chipping into everyone’s income. Further rapid expansion of the economy will worsen cost of living issues for middle and lower income Bermudians.

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Response to Government’s announcement of the approval of an SDO for the Southlands development

Members of the Bermuda Environmental and Sustainability Taskforce (BEST) are outraged at the approval of a Special Development Order (SDO) for the Southlands development project. In March of 2007, Minister of the Environment Neletha Butterfield, made public a draft of the SDO and invited consultation – an action for which she deserved and received credit. The draft SDO was soundly discredited by planning, architectural and environmental experts. In addition, in the short period of time that was allowed for objection, thousands of island residents signed a petition against the SDO and hundreds marched in protest and sent letters of objection to both Minister Butterfield and Premier Brown.

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We believe a decision by the Minister of the Environment issuing an SDO for the Southlands development is imminent.

We urge you as members of the Bermuda public to voice your protest against this decision now by doing the following;

Here are some letters that have already been written and sent to the Minister of the Environment:Â

Dear Minister,
As a Bermudian I feel the development of any area of open space in Bermuda would be disastrous for our current population and devastating to the future of our island home. (more…)

Did you watch “Southlands and South Shore” on ZBM? Do you have an opinion on this issue that you would like to share? If so, click on “comments” above and have your say (all comments are held for approval first before appearing on the site in order to avoid spam).

Dear friend of the Environment,

In order for the Bermuda Environment and Sustainability Taskforce (BEST) to continue the fight against the ongoing threats to our diminishing open spaces we must begin to raise funds to support our cause. (more…)

The following is the transcript of a speech given by Mr. Rudolph Hollis (recent ex-Director for the Department of Planning) at the BEST public meeting on March 22nd, 2007.

I was invited to come this evening and speak. As a career Civil Servant, we are obviously taught and trained not to take things personally. When we assess applications, we have to be very open-minded and simply rely on our education, the policies of the day and precedence. In many cases you will get situations where you feel very personal about something, but you have to set that aside and simply deal with the facts as they are presented to you.

My presentation simply speaks to the SDO as it’s commonly known, and what I’d like to do is simply just to look at the facts as it relates to the SDO and not to be personal in terms of the actual development of the “Southlands” property. (more…)

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The following is a transcript of a speech given by David Wingate, at the B.E.S.T public meeting held at West Pembroke Primary School, on 22 March 2007.

Given the controversy surrounding the Southlands hotel proposal at present, a small group from the Bermuda National Trust, including myself, requested and was very kindly given a personal tour of the Southlands property by Mr. Chris Christenson, who is one of the entrepreneurs and who presently lives in the beautiful old Morgan House which he has been proudly restoring. Nestled against the hillside within a rural valley it has a commanding view of the sea and behind, on the hillside, we were given a tour of the old quarry gardens with their intricate maze of connecting paths that in some instances connect between the quarries with tunnels. The whole setting was magic, the very essence of the Bermuda image that we have traditionally projected for our tourist visitors. We all agreed, too, how wonderful if all this could become more accessible for both visitors and locals.

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It has been recently reported in The Times (UK) that workers on the luxury Palm Jumeirah, sister resort to the proposed Jumeirah Southlands Resort in Bermuda, are among the 10,000 construction workers crammed into a desert labour camp on the outskirts of Dubai. The report describes how labourers from Asia are lured to Dubai with promises of well-paid jobs. However, the abuse of basic human rights has been reported, including confiscation of passports, low and unpaid wages, mass deportations and poor health and safety procedures leading to injuries, suicides and deaths. In light of Bermuda’s recent commemoration of the Slave Trade Act and our calls to end modern day slavery, the partnership between local developers and the Jumeirah group must be looked at in a new light.