The government is considering building a boardwalk on Mayreau’s world-famous Salt Whistle Bay, where a breached isthmus had threatened the beach after Hurricane Beryl in July.
The breach was repaired at a cost of EC$750,000, less than half of the EC$2.1 million that had been allocated for it, Minister of Finance Camillo Gonsalves has told Parliament.
He said that Mayreau residents would be consulted before a boardwalk is built.
“The Salt Whistle Bay restoration, simply by going by on a boat and eyeballing it from the sea with two separate engineers, we thought that It would come in at about $2 million so we budgeted $2.1 million …
“What we actually did, though, through Value Engineering and through the excellent work of the Kelectric Company, that $2.1 million budget was not exhausted. They did that work for about $750,000,” Gonsalves said.
“There is a subsequent plan for Salt Whistle Bay that we have designed that includes a boardwalk and all sorts of things. But we really want to take that to the people of Mayreau, because it fundamentally changes the ambience of Salt Whistle Bay,” he told lawmakers.
“And we think that the residents of Mayreau should have an opportunity to express their view before we go forward with the larger project,” Gonsalves said.
Goverment needs to fix the following beaches on mainland to enhance the tourism product: Villa, Indian Bay, Young Island, Canash and Arnos Vale. These five beaches if redeveloped properly would be a game changer for mainland. Land needs to be reclaimed for villa and indian bay beach and white sand brought in for all these beaches.
It’s disgusting, the way how the Gonsalves family goes about business in SVG as if it is their own backyard. They will continue to be the wealthy and speaking in our name and borrowing money in our name, where some of the borrowed monies disappear into their accounts. It is time for that to stop. Hands off SVG Gonsalves.