The Central Planning Authority on Wednesday approved the planning application for Dart’s new 10-storey hotel near Seven Mile Beach.
The application for the $80 million Hotel Indigo came before the planning board on 16 Feb., but a decision was not made at that meeting because no input on the potential environmental impact of the project had been received from the National Conservation Council at that time. This was because Cabinet had failed to appoint members to the council.
However, on the same day, Cabinet rushed through appointments to the council, and a report written by the Department of Environment on the Hotel Indigo project, on behalf of the NCC, was then submitted to the Central Planning Authority for consideration.
The 282-room building, which is scheduled to open in 2024, is located about 700 feet from the high-water mark at Seven Mile Beach, south of the Kimpton Seafire Resort + Spa.
The application for the project was submitted by the Dart-owned Shoreline Development Company Ltd (DECCO Ltd).
The DoE’s submission was not included in the CPA’s agenda that was made public prior to the meeting. However, Gina Ebanks-Petrie, director of the DoE, told the Compass that its screening opinion and a substantive review of the project had been submitted in time for Wednesday’s meeting.
According to the agenda, the environmental report, if submitted on time, would have been forwarded to all members of the CPA.
The DoE’s screening opinion did not recommend that an environmental impact assessment of the project should be carried out, but advised that the application should be held in abeyance pending the formulation of the Seven Mile Beach Corridor Area Plan “which is the appropriate mechanism to plan for major infrastructure projects”.
It added that, “At a minimum, the applicant should be required to commission a hotel needs assessment to document the need for this development in this part of Grand Cayman.”
The DoE stated that it was premature to permit a further hotel development along the Seven Mile Beach corridor, “which currently has many other hotels which are under-occupied and in financial distress, with no firm guarantees regarding the speed at which the tourism economy will recover”.
In its report, the DoE also raised concerns about the impact on Seven Mile Beach, which it said would become more crowded with the addition of another hotel in the vicinity. Similar concerns were also raised by CPA chairman AL Thompson at the 16 Feb. hearing.
Dart representatives at the meeting said that guests at the hotel would be directed, via a heavily vegetated, pedestrianised path, to use the hotel’s specially designated beach area north of the Calico Jack’s site.
Parking numbers
In response to a request from the CPA at the 16 Feb. meeting, Shoreline submitted a plan with a revised number of car parking spaces – from 278 to 305 – but asked the board to reconsider its request and allow the hotel to revert to 278 spaces.
“We are confident that 278 spaces are more than adequate for the proposed hotel given our experience operating similar hotels such as the Kimpton,” the developer stated in the revised submission.
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