Cabinet has appointed nine members to the National Conservation Council, after months of the environmental watchdog being inactive because of delays in appointing members.
According to a summary of the minutes of the 1 Aug. Cabinet meeting, government has appointed former National Trust environmental programmes manager and nature tour guide Stuart Mailer as chairman of the board. He takes up the role of the late McFarlane Connolly, who passed away last month.
Cabinet also appointed Lisa Hurlston-McKenzie, Capt. Harrison Bothwell, Frank Roulstone, Patricia Bradley, Ian Kirkham, Pierre Foster, Lucille Seymour and Stephen Broadbelt as voting members.
A delay by Cabinet in appointing new members or reappointing existing ones, whose two-year terms ran out this year, has meant the council has not been operational in recent months.
Mailer told the Compass that the last internal meeting held by members was about two months ago.
According to the council’s website, the last general public meeting it held was in December last year.
The council needs to have at least seven voting members for a quorum, according to the National Conservation Act.
Mailer was a member of the previous board, and his two-year term ran out in July. Some other members’ terms had run out earlier, he said.
“We’ve agreed to hold a meeting with the new members next Wednesday, (16 Aug.). That, I think, will probably be followed by a public meeting the following Wednesday,” he said.
He added that items the council had been working on had come to a “screeching halt” in recent months while membership of the body was awaiting approval.
Roulstone, who was also a non-voting member of the previous board as director of the National Trust for the Cayman Islands, told the Compass, “I am pleased that the NCC has been reappointed and look forward to resuming the work of the committee as outlined in the law.”
He added, “I am deeply saddened by the loss of our previous chairman and pledge to do my part in keeping with the high standards he maintained.”
Council ‘effectively disbanded’
The National Trust, in a statement in May, appealed to government to appoint or reappoint people to the council, as its two-year term had ended, leaving it “effectively disbanded”.
It said at the time, “The lack of an active National Conservation Council is to the detriment of the people and environment of the Cayman Islands.”
The Trust was prompted to issue its statement after lawmakers in April voted unanimously on a private member’s motion for work to begin immediately on a stretch of the East-West Arterial extension before an environmental impact assessment had been completed.
The National Conservation Council, in 2016, directed that the road extension required an environmental impact assessment, as it would encroach on up to 174 acres of the Central Mangrove Wetland, “with the potential indirect disturbance of a larger area”.
Following months of public consultations and drafting of a final scope of the assessment, issued in May, a $3.4 million EIA of the extension is currently under way.
In June, legislators queried in Parliament why the environmental impact assessment on the section of the East-West Arterial from Hirst Road to Lookout Gardens was still going ahead after every elected member of government had voted against it and while the National Conservation Council, which had ordered the EIA, was “defunct”.
During that debate, when asked why members of the council, which is a statutory body created under the National Conservation Act, had not been appointed or reappointed, Premier Wayne Panton said members’ terms had expired in recent weeks “and there have been some discussions about who should replace those people”. He said he expected the issue to be “resolved shortly”.
The members of the conservation council, announced Thursday, 10 Aug. when the summary of the minutes of the 1 Aug. Cabinet meeting were publicly released, include five reappointments – Mailer, Bradley, Bothwell, Foster and Hurlston-McKenzie – while Broadbelt, Kirkham and Seymour are newly appointed members. Roulstone had been a non-voting statutory government appointee on the previous council, but has now been appointed as a voting member and a representative of the Trust.
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