Building a new airport terminal is “unequivocally the best way” to deal with the problems at the ageing present facility, according to Aaron Adderley, general manager at the Department of Airport Operations.

“I can only speak from an operations standpoint,” Mr Adderley added, closing his appearance before the Public Accounts Committee yesterday as the group continued to review the proposed redevelopment at LF Wade International Airport.

However, analyst Larry Burchall delivered a grim assessment of the island’s economic predicament and the “rosy” tourism arrivals projections given by Aecon, the Bermuda Government’s Canadian partner in the deal for a new terminal.

Mr Burchall emphasised that the project would take away $37 million in “desperately” needed revenue, while gambling on an unlikely revival of tourism.

Mr Adderley appeared before the PAC first alongside Wendell Burchall, manager of maintenance and engineering for the airport, to provide a breakdown of the $184 million cost attached to renovating the existing terminal.

Assessing the cost of overhauling the terminal while relocating services, Mr Burchall said he “did not see anything whatsoever in trying to renovate”.

Mr Adderley cautioned that figures for the money generated by the facility were “somewhat overstated”, given that austerity measures did not reflect the true level of expenditure needed: the DAO should have 44 members of staff, he said, but operated with 32.

“I’ve had staff in and out of hospital for stress-related issues; I’ve had staff going into hospital with two legs and coming out with one — we are very stressed.”

Both PAC chairman Wayne Furbert and Progressive Labour Party MP Michael Weeks spoke favourably of “rolling renovations” at the existing terminal to provide local jobs, keep airport revenue at home, and potentially renovate the Causeway across Castle Harbour, as an alternative to the Government’s public-private partnership with Aecon.

Mr Burchall, meanwhile, appeared as “a taxpayer and interested Bermudian”, telling the PAC he had no political axe to grind.

Government’s debt burden and struggles to raise revenue, combined with a falling Bermudian population and moribund tourism, created “a morass of problems while we are all fussing about the airport”.

Foreign workers in low-echelon jobs took positions that Bermudians could fill, while high-end workers created jobs — “and the job creators are not coming”.

Mr Burchall said Aecon had predicated the deal on “a healthy, rosy picture of tourist numbers coming to Bermuda going up and up for 30 years” — but pointed out that “the base case revenue guarantee means that if the rosy picture does not come true, we make up the difference”.

The island’s revival depended on wooing foreign workers back to Bermuda, Mr Burchall said, but the Government had failed in communicating that urgency to ordinary Bermudians mistrustful of overseas workers during an economic recession.

And he likened present efforts to the attempts by passers-by to revive him last month after he collapsed in the street from cardiac arrest. Passer-by Rick Means had noticed people wiping the blood from his forehead, but checked his pulse and gave the CPR that saved his life, Mr Burchall told the committee.

“He asked the right question. I lived,” Mr Burchall said. “This Government is like the bystander — mopping up the blood.”