I agree with the assertion that it will be built, and to Jeff's current plans. He may tinker a bit around the edges, but only enough to make it appear that he's listening and acting accordingly.

Jeff Pierce has no choice. He's been marketing this place for many months as if it were already approved, and AFAIK (I'm not party to his commercial dealings) he has sold or contracted to sell units that cannot be built unless this plan IS approved. He did it this way because he knows how the system works here. When you're working at his level you don't do things the public way - you go to the people who matter via the back door, sweet talk them, pay whatever it takes to whoever it takes (a few million are lost in the noise of his future profits on this deal).

Then you build it, sell it, and then get the hell out of Dodge City before the general public wake up to what has been done, to what the true ecological cost has been. Look at Reef Village, another of his brain children, but in scale a mere precursor to his coming masterpiece - does anyone seriously expect that Jeff Pierce will put his hand in his pocket to deal with the major problems he's generated? The road, sewage, the mudflats where there used to be mangrove?

He may well spend a few thousand to make it look as if he is doing something, especially while he feels he still needs to win over public opinion to get South Beach under way. Look at the "thousand dollars" he recently said he spent on fill for the road. Purely cosmetic, swept away by the next high tide. Not the hundred thousand needed to construct a proper road past his mudbath.

If he won't even put right a mess that he directly created on just a few hundred yards of road, does anyone SERIOUSLY think he'll carry out the promise made on his behalf at the meeting that he would upgrade and maintain the ENTIRE road from South Beach to town? Is that a pink pig I see flying past my window?

No, long before the next hurricane which REALLY exposes what he's done he'll be off. Not to another country - he knows how easy it is to get rich from Belize - but to another part of our country that he feels is ripe for exploitation.

Am I cynical? You bet. Am I unduly cynical? Well, what do you think?

Given that this country apparently remains so corrupt that he CAN know with certainty that his project will proceed to completion, the best we can hope for is that all the support activities (such as the road work) are built into his contract and have to be done first, or the money for them put into escrow if early completion isn't practically feasible.

Of course, the ideal would be for the prescribed legal process to be enforced impartially, but who thinks that will happen?

One point that hasn't been made, most noticeably not by the police superintendent who attended the meeting. With such an enormous influx of itinerant workers, can we expect petty crime levels in the south of the island to rocket? What happens when the project is nearing completion, and those people who have made this place their home (though exactly where I have no idea - I've seen no mention of temporary housing being erected for the workers) lose their jobs and income, what about crime levels then?