Date: Wednesday, 2 April 2025
Candidates
- Romellia Welcome (IND)
- Joseph ‘Joey’ Hew*~ (PPM)
- * incumbent
- ~party leader
The forum
The 15th in the Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce’s candidates’ series shifted to the district of George Town North, where incumbent and PPM party leader Joey Hew defended his seat against independent challenger Romellia Welcome.
Hew has represented the constituency of George Town North since 2013 and served as Minister of Commerce, Planning and Infrastructure in 2017. He led the establishment of the Cayman Islands Centre for Business Development as well as the George Town revitalisation project. Locally, Hew cited his work bettering enhanced drainage systems, road safety measures and neighbourhood cleanup programmes.
Hew says he is running for office because “the country is at a crossroads politically”, pointing to the lack of stability and meetings in Parliament. As party leader, Hew says he is prepared to hit the ground running to put the country “back on the path of prosperity”.
Welcome, a longtime community advocate, served with the George Town Community Development Action Committee and cofounded the Cayman Kind Action Committee in 2022. Her work includes organising events for children, the elderly and vulnerable residents, leading neighbourhood cleanups and securing support for local beautification projects.
Welcome says she is focused on tackling the cost of living, education reform and environmental protection at the national level, and locally, her priorities include flood mitigation, road improvements and community enhancement.
Key issues
Education
The candidates spoke about the need for education reform and stressed the need for hands-on training and job opportunities for local youth.
Welcome was blunt in her assessment of the current system, saying, “The education system is broken.”
She proposed a free after-school programme for students who are underachievers and also said she would advocate for the return of middle schools to better prepare students for high school. She also called for a vocational trade school for students who were not interested in white-collar jobs.
Hew cited education as one of his top three priorities. He stressed the need to better improve the system, pointing to the 60% of pupils in year 11 that are not meeting national standards.
Hew called for a focus on early childhood education, with an emphasis on reading, writing and mathematics. He also suggested looking at the roles that are being filled by work-permit holders, and to start offering scholarships to students to train in those areas.
Beach erosion
With climate change increasingly affecting one of Cayman’s economic pillars, candidates were asked about how they would tackle and fund the issue of beach erosion.
Hew stressed that the erosion on the southern end of Seven Mile Beach has become “a national crisis”, and expressed concern over buildings falling into the sea making worldwide headlines, and the devastating impact that would have on Cayman’s tourism product.
Hew supports beach re-nourishment and cites Florida as an example of how it can be executed and managed. He believes that this needs to happen before a managed retreat “can even be considered”.
He proposed partnering with the private sector to get the programme going in order to be prepared for the upcoming hurricane season. From this, he suggested the creation of a fund, “whether it’s 50 cents or 25 cents, or $1 per room a night across all three islands that will continue to feed into that fund. Because this will not be the only location and the only time that we will see this happen.”
Welcome was adamant that the people should not be picking up the tab for the costs of replenishing sand. She leveled blame at the CPA, which granted developers “permission to build too close to the water”, and suggested they should be the ones to pay for any re-nourishment costs.
Waste management
The ongoing saga of the George Town landfill and the scuttled integrated waste management system is a key concern for all residents of Cayman.
Hew lamented the “untimely death” of the ISWMS project, and was blunt in saying the country was in dire straits when it came to waste management.
“We are in a crisis,” he said. “The landfill does not have five or six years left in it, as they have said, and we are not treating it properly. International standards is to cap it every 24 hours and compact it. And we are not doing that.”
Hew proposed the introduction of mandatory recycling to reduce the amount of waste going into the landfill. Stressing that time was already running out, he said that another landfill location would be needed in the short term, while a permanent waste solution is identified.
“We are facing an environmental disaster that this country has never seen. If we have a fire like we’ve had before, we will have loss of property,” he said.
Welcome suggested that vegetation should be mulched and sold instead of winding up in the landfill. She criticised the “one-track thing for over the past 12 years with the landfill”, suggesting that in that time, recycling plants could have been operating and staffed with Caymanians.
Notable exchanges
Welcome, reading from prepared remarks in her opening statement, criticised Hew’s “empty promises of the past 12 years” and vowed to be the “steadfast barrier that stops his broken-promise train”. She frequently responded to questions with “my opponent had 12 years” to address many of the key issues being discussed.
Hew, first elected in 2013, pointed out that he has only been in government for eight of those years, and four as a member of the opposition. He was adamant in defending his record, from his private member’s motion to create programmes for Caymanians to own homes, to intervening on behalf of the elderly on fixed incomes who are often stymied when dealing with the NAU.
Watch forum online
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