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Betraying an Educational Vision
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
By Dr. Grant Gibbons, JP, MP United Bermuda Party
Today’s Senate debate on further Coco Reef concessions is an opportunity to re-open the debate that Premier Brown shut down two weeks ago in the House of Assembly.
The Coco Reef Concessions Act perpetuates a situation where the PLP government arranged the handover of public land and hotel assets belonging to Bermuda College to an outside group for private gain.
Our concerns about the Government’s Coco Reef deal are well documented, from the Auditor General’s conclusion that the lease should be re-tendered as a matter of fairness, to the many Bermudian employees who lost their jobs in the handover, to media reports that the lease was awarded to the man who paid for the PLP’s chief political strategist in the 1998 election.
But today’s debate is also an opportunity to step back and look where the deal leaves Bermuda College today.
The Stonington Beach Hotel training facility was completed in 1980 on Bermuda College’s Paget campus to provide young Bermudian students with a world class hotel school that would give them day-to-day hands-on training experience. It was one of the few such facilities in the world.
We believe the Brown Government has betrayed that vision in order to satisfy the Coco Reef leaseholder.
When the original Stonington property was acquired at considerable effort by the Bermuda College Board and the UBP government in the late 1970s, never was it contemplated in any way, shape or form that the hotel training arm of the College would be handed over to a private hotel group.
Never was it envisioned that Bermuda College would lose control over their own hotel training school.
Never was it envisioned that land originally purchased from property owners specifically for the creation of the Bermuda College campus would be developed and leased off as condos for the benefit of a private business.
The decline of the Campus as a hotel training centre is well advanced. Under their lease, Coco Reef is required to carry on the training once provided by the Stonington Beach Hotel facility, but answers to Parliamentary questions indicate that just ten students were trained there between the summer of 2003 and the end of 2005.
Dr. Brown has made many promises about a new wave of hotel developments – from Jumeirah at Morgan’s Point to the Park Hyatt in St. George’s. But we have to ask – who is going to train the many Bermudians who will be needed to work in these hotels? If new hotels are really coming, why has his government allowed the hotel/college programme at the Stonington campus to decline to a mere shadow of its former self?
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