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Friday, July 11, 2025

Tobago comfortable with Sandals project—Young

by

Camille McEachnie
2428 days ago
20181116
THA Chief Secretary Kelvin Charles

THA Chief Secretary Kelvin Charles

Suzanne Sheppard

To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Chief Sec­re­tary Kelvin Charles says To­bag­o­ni­ans, es­pe­cial­ly busi­ness­men, are ful­ly on board with the San­dals Re­sort project.

Charles was re­spond­ing to a ques­tion on pub­lic feed­back for project in the wake of pub­lic crit­i­cism that it in­volved a se­cret deal and posed a prob­lem to the is­land’s ecosys­tem.

“As far as I am aware, the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty is very com­fort­able with the project ... we just came back from World Trav­el Mar­ket where we went to launch, at an in­ter­na­tion­al lev­el, our new Go To Mar­ket strat­e­gy,” Charles told re­porters at yes­ter­day’s post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing at Mag­dale­na Grande Re­sort in To­ba­go.

He not­ed that many tour op­er­a­tors and air­lines at the WTM were pleased the THA was up­grad­ing the qual­i­ty of its room stock by in­tro­duc­ing San­dals to the is­land.

“Truth be told, we do not cur­rent­ly have any five-star ho­tel in To­ba­go and what will be com­ing with a San­dals brand is a five-star ho­tel.”

Ques­tioned fur­ther about con­cerns raised by To­ba­go’s en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists that the project would neg­a­tive­ly im­pact the en­vi­ron­ment, Charles re­ferred to state­ments made ear­li­er by Min­is­ter Stu­art Young.

Young had said San­dals aimed to do what­ev­er was nec­es­sary to pre­serve the en­vi­ron­ment.

“There is go­ing to be ab­solute­ly no in­ter­fer­ence with the No Man’s Land split. In fact, I was here a few months ago and did a walk­through of the (area ) ... and the man­grove with the San­dals ex­ec­u­tives and what they were dis­cussing is the clean-up of the No Man’s Land split for the pub­lic,” Young said.

“San­dals has a great record of deal­ing with the en­vi­ron­ment in which they build ... they (San­dals) have done in the re­con­struc­tion of reefs... and man­groves.”

Since it was dis­cov­ered that San­dals Re­sorts’ waste might af­fect the Buc­coo Reef and Ny­lon Pool, en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists have crit­i­cised the Gov­ern­ment’s use of that area. A pub­lic pe­ti­tion has been cir­cu­lat­ing on so­cial me­dia and per­sons have gone on record to pub­licly ques­tion the use of the area. One such per­son En­vi­ron­ment To­ba­go founder Pat Turpin.

“It’s quite iron­ic that some of the peo­ple that are the loud­est op­posers to the area where San­dals should go ... some of these peo­ple them­selves may have ques­tions to an­swer in oth­er parts of To­ba­go, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the north­west­ern end of To­ba­go and pos­si­ble pol­lut­ing of the beach­es up on that side,” Young said.

Turpin op­er­ates a busi­ness in Char­lot­teville, which is the north­west­ern end of To­ba­go.

On the is­sue of the sta­tus of the San­dals project, Stu­art said it will move ahead to the sec­ond stage as the San­dals Re­sorts board de­cid­ed last week to pro­ceed.


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