Buying back Cayman: Government spent $25M on new land last year

When it comes to land, government is a buyer not a seller.

Seeking to reverse loss of public spaces, parks and beaches and declining shoreline access over several decades, Lands and Infrastructure Minister Jay Ebanks said the coalition was committed to continuing a recent spending spree on buying land.

The creation of a the new Central Scranton Park is one part of a concerted strategy to acquire private land for public space, he said. Citing historic loss of open, public beachfront across the islands, and particularly along Seven Mile Beach, he defended the expenditure as an investment in Cayman’s future and a hedge against the perceived mistakes of the past.

Last year, government spent $25 million to acquire 74 new parcels of land for a mix of conservation, agriculture, housing and public parks projects.

The approach, which has spanned several administrations and accelerated under former Premier Juliana O’Connor-Connolly, now back with the Progressives in opposition, appears to have support from all sides.

Over the previous eight years, the Cayman Islands government spent approximately $86 million acquiring 765 acres of land. In 2024 alone, just over $11 million was spent on 19 parcels earmarked for parks, shoreline access and coastal protection.

Recent acquisitions have included beachfront sites in South Sound, at the West Bay lighthouse, waterfront property in the capital, and the former Mariner’s Cove property in Prospect. Earlier purchases included Pease Bay in Bodden Town, multiple areas in Old Man Bay, and 125 acres for conservation on Cayman Brac.

Significant work has been done to create public parks and beaches and begin housing projects at some of those sites, while others remain dormant. The investment totals reflect the land prices only and do not include the cost of landscaping and developing the plots.

Ebanks said the policy is a deliberate shift in approach. He accepted some may question the level of investment, including somewhere between $8 million and $10 million total expenditure on the Central Scranton Park, but insisted, “The question should be: why not?”

“As minister of lands, I don’t believe in selling land,” he said. “I believe in buying land.”

Reversing past mistakes

Ebanks said the strategy is intended to reverse what he sees as a historic pattern of beachfront property being sold into private hands and effectively lost as public space, a dynamic he argues has played out along Seven Mile Beach.

“We have never secured enough beach property on Seven Mile Beach, and now we’re having a problem where we don’t have any beach to go to,” he said.

“If we had the vision then to buy more beach properties, we would have had so much more.”

The result, he suggested, is both an access issue and a broader space constraint along Cayman’s most developed shoreline.

“We’re going to continue to buy as much property as we can … beach property, agriculture property, property for housing, and property for protecting the environment,” he said.

Previous Cayman Compass reporting indicates the acquisitions have generally been made at market value, based on independent valuations, rather than through compulsory purchase. An outlier is government’s contested efforts to force the sale of Dora’s Beach in George Town, where a small fishermen’s market has established itself over the years. That dispute with the landowner is scheduled to go to court next week.

George Town Central MP Kenneth Bryan accepted that the Scranton park and the expansion of the nearby Cricket Square office complex might raise real estate values in the area and put pressure on people who have lived in the neighbourhood for decades to move out.

He said that had been the case for some time in this area of the capital, where decades-old family homesteads sit shoulder-to-shoulder with new office buildings.

“People will only sell if they want to sell,” Bryan said. “Are there development pressures on them? Of course.”

He noted that for decades in George Town, neighbourhoods like Scranton have been thinning out as people sold up or moved on.

Bryan said that brought economic opportunity, too.

“Some families get to a point in their life where they say, ‘We’re moving out, our kids have moved on.’ Over time, people do sell,” he said.

Bryan, who is deputy leader of the Opposition PPM party but sat in a previous government coalition with Ebanks, said he supports the policy of government buying land for parks. And if any other plots do become available in the area, he believes government should be the one to buy them.

He added, “Trust me; if the government didn’t buy it, a developer would have bought it, and there would have been skyscrapers here rather than this beautiful park for my people.”

He added, “Development is coming. The question is whether the community benefits from it.”

Government spend on land:

$25 million*: Total spent acquiring 74 new parcels of land for Crown in 2025

$86 million: Spend on land purchases over preceding eight years

765 acres: Total land area added to the public estate in that period.

198 parcels acquired since 2018: Including Pease Bay Beach Park, Old Man Bay parks, Mariner’s Cove (Prospect), coastal land in South Sound and North Side, and sites expanding public beaches such as Governor Russell, Rebecca’s Beach and Bo Miller Beach.

• *Figure includes purchases approved by Cabinet that have not yet closed or been formally acquired and remain subject to ‘due diligence and valuation work’.