Solving the public problems of Public Beach

“It’s amazing, just so beautiful.”

“It’s nasty, nasty, nasty.”

Few places in the Cayman Islands can attract such contrasting opinions as Public Beach. This 650-foot golden stretch of sand has been called everything from “a slice of Caribbean paradise” to a “Wild West” trouble spot, but what can’t be disputed is that it attracts thousands of holidaymakers every week during the high tourist season.

This makes it one of the most popular spots in the entire Cayman Islands and for some visitors, the only part of the country they see other than the port terminal.

Yet behind the crystal-clear waters and sandy shoreline, Public Beach has seen its share of problems, including petty crime, litter, poor facilities and anti-social behaviour.

None of these problems are new or even exclusive to Public Beach and politicians past and present have declared themselves eager to tackle the situation.

But, for such a high-profile area that is so crucial to Cayman’s tourism industry, it can be hard to understand why there aren’t more signs of concrete action when it comes to cleaning up the area, literally and figuratively. 

Cruise visitors

Thankfully for Cayman’s tourism industry, visitors to Public Beach generally seem delighted to be there. With rows of loungers available to rent and beach vendors selling everything from souvenirs to jerk chicken, plus watersports and parasailing, it is a popular spot on any cruise day.

While the beauty of the beach can’t be denied, vendors’ stalls are less eye-catching, consisting of temporary structures made of metal and plastic. The tiny purpose-built vendor huts stand confusingly empty, and there is a long line of people queueing at the few restrooms available.

Regular visitor June Burrows from Minnesota had travelled to Cayman on a Carnival ship with her friend Anna Cain, a first timer on island. The pair “floated and enjoyed the sunshine”, hired two beach chairs and umbrellas for $30 and bought “awesome chicken, rice and beans from a local vendor”.

“It’s my fourth time to Cayman and I come to Public Beach every time,” said Burrows. “It was better this time than other times – there weren’t as many panhandlers. Other times you could get hassled by people selling stuff, braiding hair, that type of thing. But it’s pretty here. I’ll be back for a fifth time in November.”

A similar positive note was sounded by Mark Liep and wife Thayna from Germany, whose only complaints were that “the weather could have been a little bit better. The biggest problem is that the ship is leaving so early, so we can’t really enjoy it. But the beach is beautiful.”

US visitor Star White, who was aboard Carnival Sunrise, was also impressed on her first visit to the Cayman Islands but had some suggestions.

“The beach was amazing and I loved the beach club [Bonny Moon] – 10 out of 10,” she said. “But there’s no ATMs, so if you want to buy something from the beach vendors and haven’t got any cash, then, well, you can’t. But the water was amazing, I swam the whole time.”

While the day-trippers were happy, there was a dramatically different view from locals. Taxi driver Kemar Scott’s main complaint was that the beach was woefully ill-equipped in the bathroom department.

“They need more bathrooms, there’s only two stalls in this block and the other block over there,” he said. “There are like thousands people here today and you’ve got to have more restrooms than that.”

Litter problem

Ryan Denoyer from Paddle Wheel Adventures has been leading tour groups around the island for five years and says that Public Beach has changed in that time.

“I don’t know if it’s improved or gotten worse,” he said, ‘but it’s definitely changed. I’d say [some of the problems are] less upfront, so you can’t roll through and smell weed every single day – it’s more like every third day now.”

Denoyer has his particular bugbear – litter.

“I would love to see better waste management”, he said. “On Sundays, everyone goes into the cabanas, orders 10 Domino’s pizzas and then tries to shove the boxes into the trash cans, right? So instead, there should be bigger bins, or at least make sure that the bins are emptied on Saturday night.”

Lifelong service

The most impassioned response came from taxi manager Donverd Kelly who has worked on Public Beach all his life. He summed up the situation in one word: “nasty”.

“The government has let it go slip away – people selling weed, cocaine, preparing food without washing hands, everything,” he said. “It’s just gone out of whack and the government is just dragging their feet and they don’t want to do nothing about it because of votes, straight and simple.”

The beach needed vendors, he said, but “not a pile of shanty huts with tarpaulin on top and no place to wash their dishes. It’s the truth. We need better facilities and we need better policing.”

And while there is a police presence, he said, it isn’t enough. “There are one or two police officers here but they can’t do it all,” he said. 

The tiny huts built for vendors also came in for criticism, but the perceived inactivity of the current government to address the problems of Public Beach was his main complaint.

The facilities – or lack thereof – at Public Beach have been raised in a long-running legal action by a group of vendors who are trying to challenge authorities over being denied licences to trade on Seven Mile Beach Park.

A statement from their attorney, Kattina Anglin, said, “My clients, some of whom have been vending on that beach for decades, recognise and appreciate the value their services and the beach offer to visiting tourists and to locals, and wish to see it upgraded to represent our tourism industry to the highest degree.”

These recommendations include the creation of a proper vendor’s market equipped with electricity and water, a move that will eliminate the use of tents and make the beach more attractive to visitors.

They are also recommending expanded bathroom facilities with proper disability access, installing CCTV cameras to monitor illegal activity and proper lighting at night. They are also asking for full-time officers from Customs and Border Control, Royal Cayman Islands Police Service and Cayman Islands Coast Guard to be stationed at Public Beach to ensure that illegal vending, assaults, theft and robberies are deterred.

Turf dispute

While Public Beach is known to tourists as a place to soak up the sun for a few hours, concerns over illegal vendors have been going on for years, while worries over crime in the area haven’t gone away. Sometimes the two issues can clash. Last August, Caymanian Romell Millwood was found guilty in the Grand Court of attacking an illegal beach vendor with a knife several times in front of tourists during a “turf dispute” over vending territory on Public Beach in April 2023.

Millwood was later sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for wounding with intent for the offence.

In handing down her sentence, Justice Emma Peters said, “This was a vicious, sustained and public attack on the victim on Public Beach in the middle of the day when it was packed with tourists.”

Peters added, “Public Beach is where many tourists, particularly day visitors coming off cruise ships, spend the day. The Cayman Islands has a reputation in the Caribbean for being safe and secure and its reputation therefore enhances the tourist industry and the resultant economic benefits that it brings. Such frightening and serious attacks have the capacity to cause real harm to the tourist industry and to harm the reputation of the Cayman Islands.”

No district can claim to be crime-free, but when the crimes occur in such a high-profile location, as Peters pointed out, the effects can be wide-ranging. If tourists themselves are directly targeted, the impact to Cayman’s crucial tourism industry could be immense.

A few weeks before Christmas, several cruise ship visitors who were each only on the island for a few hours were robbed in two separate incidents near Seven Mile Beach on the same day. Three men were later arrested and charged over the robberies. Earlier this month, a man was arrested just north of Public Beach following reports of indecent exposure in the area, while back in June last year, two men were arrested after police were alerted to reports of drugs being sold on Public Beach. 

Pledge to improve Public Beach

Governments over the years have promised to tackle the issue once and for all and André Ebanks’ NCFC government is no different. Just weeks into taking office in early May last year, ministers were vocal in their commitment to improving Public Beach. In one of first speeches since becoming minister for tourism, Deputy Premier Gary Rutty was unequivocal in his wish to smarten up Public Beach which, he said, fell short of what was expected.

“On a recent visit to Public Beach, I was extremely disappointed to see beach chairs tossed in bushes, garbage left behind and barbecues chained to light poles,” he told members of the Cayman Islands Tourism Association forum last July.

“This is not the experience of Cayman that we want our visitors to have. As the minister for tourism, I cannot allow this type of thing to continue on my watch. I am not at all satisfied with the situation at Public Beach, and have already reached out to the relevant ministries and departments to address these concerns.”

Rutty later reiterated his point on Radio Cayman’s ‘For The Record’ show, saying he heard of a family who had to return to their cruise ship early following an incident on Public Beach and said that he was “not happy with that at all”.

“I don’t want to hear those kinds of stories,” he said. “We’re going to fix it and make it right … We have to make sure that what we’re providing for our tourists and our visitors is top quality.”

Sitting beside Rutty when he made those remarks was Planning Minister Jay Ebanks, who said he was planning to tackle the many issues facing Public Beach, including anti-social behaviour, litter, the state of the public toilets, jet ski operators and the long-standing issue of illegal vendors.

“We are going to look at how we vend on our beaches,” he said. “A lot of our vendors are going to have to just clean up and move their stuff with them every single day and we’re going to have to stop vending on the weekends. On Saturdays and Sundays, the beach will be for the locals to enjoy.”

As well as clamping down on the stacking of lounge chairs on the beach at the end of the day – which Ebanks described as treating the beach “like it’s a storage compound” – he said he planned to implement stiffer penalties for smoking ganja and selling alcohol.

He added that he was looking at hiring more Public Lands Commission officers dedicated to Seven Mile Beach and hiring more people to monitor and clean the bathrooms and to keep the beach clean.

“Seven Mile Beach is one of those areas we need dedicated staff – cleaning early morning and coming back in the afternoon and cleaning is not working,” said Ebanks. 

But many who use the beach on a regular basis might question what action is actually being done to improve the situation, given that government has been talking for months about these issues.

Last week, Premier Ebanks, whose West Bay South constituency includes Public Beach, said when it came to dealing with the issue of illegal vendors, there was still work to be done.

“It’s not working,” he said. “The question is, what’s the best way to fix it? One view might be, well, there’s only a few handful so push them off. We get our beach back. But these are real people with real lives with real consequences. So whatever the decisions may have been over the past – how they got there – they’re there.”

Ebanks said that Caucus recently decided to spend the next six months looking at the data to see where the vendors were operating, who they were selling to and what other places they could be moved to, so they weren’t all in one place.

“The overarching message is it needs to be a carefully considered approach to take people’s livelihoods into account,” said Ebanks, suggesting the government could “move them into more separated sites” where the vendors could still operate their small businesses.

Illegal activity

As for the overall situation regarding Public Beach, Ebanks said, “The visitor experience and the activities that go on there … there’s no secret. There has been all sorts of discussion of illicit activity happening there.”

While he said that there are existing laws and existing enforcement to deal with the issue, “from a broad policy standpoint, I think it’s incumbent on us as the elected leadership to then provide a much better environment than to have to keep managing this.”

The Compass reached out to the Ministry of Planning, Lands, Agriculture, Housing and Infrastructure after the attacks on the cruise ship visitors to ask what was being done to improve safety on Public Beach and the wider Seven Mile Beach area, as well as what was being done regarding clamping down on illegal activity on Public Beach, including licensing enforcement of illegal vendors.

Regarding public safety, the ministry said that mobile police patrols had increased in the Seven Mile Beach area, including Public Beach, saying, “Recent incidents involving cruise passengers have reinforced the importance of maintaining a visible presence and close coordination across agencies.”

Regarding illegal activity including drugs and alcohol sales, the ministry said that Public Lands Inspectorate maintains an enforcement presence at Public Beach, conducting daily patrols, with “heightened oversight on high-traffic days”.

Recommendations

The ministry said, “While specific operational deployment levels cannot be disclosed, the Government can confirm that enforcement coverage at Public Beach has been sustained and continues to be adjusted in response to risk levels, visitor volumes, and emerging intelligence.”

It added, “These patrols are supported by engagement with public and private sector stakeholders, along with recommendations for environmental and infrastructure improvements such as enhanced lighting, CCTV coverage and bush cutting to improve visibility and safety.”

It also said that: “RCIPS is now working with partner agencies on a more sustained, year-round approach to security and public safety, in consultation with relevant government departments, to ensure a coordinated response.”