UWP President Isaac Baptiste, UWP Opposition Leader Lennox Linton, and former UWP Prime Minister Edison Chenfil James among other people have charged DLP Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit to justify his choice of Wesley for the location of the proposed international airport.
Baptiste, a physical planner and an architect, challenged Skerrit to provide an official report that justifies the siting of the airport at Wesley over the earlier locations chosen by former governments. Baptiste said the UWP government in 1998 approved the Londonderry location for the airport after due consultations with Planning and Stanley Engineering. He added that the located was also verified for the airport by the International Civil Aviation Authority and the OECS Aviation Authorities, Antigua.
PM Skerrit however countered the assertion of the UWP by stating that the report of Planning and Stanley Engineering must have been politically biased and therefore not fully reliable and credible. He added that a team of local experts disagreed with the earlier reports made by former researchers and that the newer study conformed to the 2009 findings of Sir Alexander Gibbs produced under the DFP government.
“They set aside the UWP site of 1998, for a number of reasons,” Skerrit revealed. “The visibility issue, massive cloud cover, it would only be…non-instrument landing and the airport would be in serious difficulty in terms of functioning because visibility would be poor. So they set aside this report and went ahead with the recommendations of Sir Alexander Gibbs in respect to the location.”
Skerrit said the DLP government hired Landrum and Brown, a US firm, to conduct another feasibility study of the proposed area and they chose the exact location earlier chosen by the Sir Alexander Gibbs team, with a slight shift in the alignment.
Baptiste however argued that Skerrit must publish the new studies discreding the sites chosen by the UWP government – and that the report must indicate the size, location, alignment, and how the site impacts on the people of Wesley village. “It will destroy Wesley, in terms of the removal and dislocation of properties of people and what will be left of Wesley is noise pollution, dust pollution and other pollutions…” he contended.
Further to his contention, Linton stated that the DLP administration would err if they chose MMCE Ltd as the sole contractor for constructing the international airport, and that it would cost less to site the airport on the former locations choosen by Planning and Stanley Partners under the Edison James administration. He also contends that the general public must be privy to how the Skerrit administration intends to finance the airport as well as get it off the ground.
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