The building of a resort at Morgan’s Point, starting with a “boutique” 84-room hotel, has won bipartisan support with the approval of a fresh land agreement for the West End property.

Developer Craig Christensen called the passage of the Morgan’s Point Resort Act 2014 “extremely significant” in getting the project moving.

“We couldn’t get financing until the Act was finished, because the land was going to be moved around,” Mr Christensen said. “We needed this to be passed for us to have certainty — that was the critical piece.”

Mr Christensen said the new land agreement “helps Government on the remediation side and makes a better plan for us”, adding: “This makes it more nimble for us to finance.”

Originally broken into seven packages of land, the brownfield site overlapping Southampton and Sandys parishes is now subdivided into 37 pieces.

Mr Christensen, along with developers Nelson Hunt and Brian Duperreault, now has just over 183 acres of land on the former US Naval Annex.

The group will be able to proceed with a small hotel in the George’s Bay area, which Mr Christensen likened to Tucker’s Point in terms of size.

The resort will no longer proceed with a golf course, and gives up 31.5 acres from its leasehold, but Mr Christensen said there was little issue given the proximity of Port Royal Golf Course, to which Morgan’s Point clients will have access under the new agreement.

“It’s right across the street from us and it would have been pointless to go into competition with Port Royal,” he said.

Otherwise, the development plans “haven’t really changed”, Mr Christensen said. The new plan leaves out a modest-sized third hotel catering to yacht owners.

After completing the boutique hotel, however, developers are committed to putting a 416-room luxury hotel out on the peninsula.

Public Works Minister Patricia Gordon-Pamplin told MPs on Friday that the Act mean “withholding 31.5 acres from leasehold and relinquishing 6.2 acres in the freehold section, such that the developers will now have a total of 183.1 acres, as against a total of 208.4 acres in the original Act”.

“This adjustment allows the Government to remediate the property that is not part of the revised boundaries,” Ms Gordon-Pamplin said.

The site’s former occupant left underground pollution in the form of jet fuel plumes, and significant environmental damage to Basset’s Cave, with the top culprit being steel fuel tanks that were buried in the ground where salt water corroded them and caused leaks.

Government has agreed to cover the cleanup, but is no longer required to execute it to “residential standard”, which would have been prohibitively expensive.

Environment and Education Minister Grant Gibbons, familiar with the site from his role under the United Bermuda Part administration in the 1995 handover, said Government would now be committed to the New Jersey residential standards of cleanup.

“That’s a very credible standard that works for the Morgan’s Point developers,” Dr Gibbons said. “It also allows Government to address other areas, like Bassett’s Cave, where the expenses are frankly still unknown.”

The new agreement “carves out” these polluted pockets of the site, and exempts Government from cleaning them to a residential standard — making it “recreational standard” instead.

“That represents a very large saving for the taxpayer,” Dr Gibbons said.

The new agreement got a warm reception from the Progressive Labour Party, with Shadow Works Minister Derrick Burgess telling the House: “That area up there will have to be a showpiece for our hotel industry in Bermuda, just like Atlantis is in the Bahamas.”

Mr Burgess praised Mr Hunt in particular for “keeping the project alive”, saying developers planned to have shovels in the ground by later this year.

The only point of contention were estimates for the original cleanup costs: Mr Burgess said one consultant had told Government it could have potentially cost $700 million to clean up the property.

“You have to watch these people — they rob us,” the Hamilton East MP said.

Dr Gibbons told MPs that the 2011 agreement signed by the PLP had caused delays to the project, because the former administration’s commitment to clean the entire site to a residential standard would have cost “not tens of millions, but hundreds of millions of dollars — it would have broken the back of Government”.

This drew a furious rebuttal from the PLP’s Zane DeSilva, who said his own company had bid on the cleanup.

“I can assure you it wasn’t in the hundreds of millions,” said Mr DeSilva, who challenged Dr Gibbons to table his information.

“We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” Dr Gibbons responded. “The former agreement was unworkable and unaffordable based on what was signed at the time.”

Mr Burgess called on Dr Gibbons to retract the statement, saying he had no figures to back up the assertion.

“Why is this honourable Minister going down this street?” Mr Burgess added.

Dr Gibbons maintained that signing to a residential standard cleanup for the worst-polluted areas would have proven impossible to meet.

“Government still intends to clean up Bassett’s Cave, but not within five years,” he said. “These very difficult areas have been taken out of the freehold and leasehold that Morgan’s Point are going to do.”

Asked by The Royal Gazette if he could produce evidence to back up the high figure cited, Dr Gibbons pointed out that Mr Burgess himself had referenced a multimillion figure.

“This new agreement allows Government the time and thoroughness and ability to do a careful analysis,” he said. “We have to do this sensibly. We have to find a reasonable standard for it. I simply don’t know any more than that.”