Hon Kurt Tibbetts Leader of Government Business and Minister for Housing

Cox Lumber will not purchase the 4.2-acre Court Road site it had sought to acquire from Government, leaving the property in the public sector, but further delaying any construction of low-cost housing.

In the on-again, off-again saga surrounding the property, Government has confirmed that Cox Lumber will not now purchase the site, which Leader of Government Business Hon Kurt Tibbetts said in late November would be sold by the end of January 2008 to the hardware, furnishings and timber company.

Cox Lumber had planned to acquire the property for a reported $2.5 million, building warehouses and a lumber yard.

“We haven’t made the announcement yet, and I cannot tell you why they are not going to buy the site, but it would have been a business decision. I think probably the contract ran out and they just didn’t pick it up,” said Leonard Ebanks, Chairman of the National Housing Development Trust (NHDT) and retired president and CEO of Fidelity Bank.

Cox Lumber founder Linton Tibbetts refused to discuss the development.

“I don’t want to answer that now,” he said.

Mr Ebanks said the NHDT was redrawing two-year-old plans for approximately 25 houses, but was unable to say when the resurrected project might start.

“We have had to do a rethink, and want to maximise the value of the property,” he said. “We’re looking at the plans and hope we would know fairly soon. We’d like to do it as quickly as we can, and we are working as feverishly as possible.”

He said that approximately eight temporary homes already on the site “would probably come down”, ending a long-running battle with deteriorating construction materials and maintenance efforts.

The Government-owned site was initially slated for post-Hurricane Ivan low-cost housing, but a surprise bid for the property from Cox Lumber one year ago persuaded planners to sell the prime site, applying the purchase price to another, larger site and enabling an expanded construction project.

A series of legal complications, however, appeared to derail the Cox deal, although Government continued to insist it would go ahead.

The acquisition now appears to be dead, however.

Meanwhile, planners have applied to rezone the 30.5-acre site of the Fairbanks Road detention centre and trailer park, reclassifying it from “institutional” to both “institutional” and “low-density residential”. The move will allow construction of between 70 and 80 low-cost homes, rehousing residents of the 17 trailers and other needy families, of which approximately 90 are on an NHDT waiting list.

“The project can’t start until the rezoning is done,” Mr Ebanks said, “and I can’t give you any specifics on when they might be complete.

“We will build mostly two-bedroom homes and some three-bedroom ones as well, with an average of between four and five people per family.”

The detention centre for both women and Cuban migrants will remain on the perimeter of the property, which will include an artificial lake as part of a public park.

“We want to do something aesthetically pleasing,” Mr Ebanks said.

“But we have to do some major work in there first; we must get the muck and peat out; it’s very swampy in places, and we need to fill it to about four feet above the water level,” he said.

Catherine Tyson, Manager of the Temporary Housing Management Team, said she hoped to see construction begin in the new financial year, “hopefully by July,” she said, “and we’d hope by the end of the year we’ll start seeing some good progress”.

Home building will not be restricted to NHDT efforts, but also include the National Recovery Fund (NRF), which will spend almost $7 million in European Union funds to create nearly 100 homes across the Cayman Islands.

“We’ll be in the same area as the NHDT, and do some in each of the five districts,” said NRF Executive Director Mark Laskin.

“We can’t build till services are in there, however,” he said. “We need proper roads, electricity, sewerage and drainage, but I don’t want to put a timeframe on it because it’s not in my hands.” He declined to predict the number of NRF homes on the Fairbanks site, however, saying it depended on NHDT plans, but once building started, he said, ”it takes about nine weeks to get a house; we’re fast”.

Cabinet Secretary Orrett Connor said he hoped to house Fairbanks trailer-park residents in either NHDT or NRF housing, saying, “Wherever people qualify we are going to try and get them in. They‘d have to qualify for ownership and need a payment plan or they’d go into the European Union-NRF housing.”

tad@caymannetnews.com