On Tuesday, June 18, the Progressive Labour Party Government accepted the full and final settlement for the termination of the 1941 US Bases Agreement. This will surely go down in our history as the most expensive mistake Bermuda has ever made.

I said in the House of Assembly that paying for the environmental damage left by the US military will cost every family of four in Bermuda a tax contribution of at least $6,000. I stand by that estimate. It is going to cost us well over $50 million in total. The PLP did not raise taxes this year, presumably because they did not want tax increases fresh in people’s minds at the next election. But sooner or later, cold financial reality will set in. And when and if the PLP Government decides to clean up the environmental mess, I can assure every tax-paying Bermudian that the contribution he or she must make to the running of this Country will jump, and jump substantially. The fiasco of the bases agreement will contribute to that increase and will negatively impact Bermuda’s finances-and the taxpayer’s wallet-for years to come.

I’d like to explain why, and I hope every Bermudian interested in good government reads what I have to say:1. The Money First.<$>Let me back up what I said about the amount of money involved. $65.7 million was identified as the cost of the environmental cleanup five years ago and that figure included $9.5 million for replacing Longbird Bridge (the causeway bridge). I have made no attempt to update the figures to allow for inflation over the years, but if the cost of the bridge replacement has gone from $9.5 million to $11 million, you can draw your own conclusions about the total cost.

In 1996, the then-UBP Government asked JA Jones Environmental Services Company, of Charlotte, North Carolina, to prepare a comprehensive estimate of what it would cost to repair the environmental damage done to the bases. JA Jones is a reputable organisation with extensive experience in the field of military environmental damage. In fact, they often worked for the US Navy, preparing estimates of environmental damage done to US bases within the United States. We asked the firm to apply the same methods, procedures and protocols they used in domestic US base closures. They reported back to us in 1997.

In their report, they identified four categories of work to be undertaken:

[box]Cleaning up petroleum and heavy-metal contamination;

[box]Eliminating friable and non-friable asbestos;

[box]Demolishing derelict and unsafe buildings; and

[box]Replacing Longbird Bridge, which they described as unsafe and prone to malfunction

The total figure JA Jones came up with was $65.7 million, which broke down this way:

[obox]$11.7 million would be spent on the environmental cleanup;

[obox]$30.9 million would be spent on removing asbestos;

[obox]$8.6 million would be spent on demolition;

[obox]$5.1 million would be spent on managing the work; and

[obox]$9.5 million would be spent on replacing Longbird Bridge.

Of the total cost, roughly 75 percent was allocated to the cleanup at Southside, while 25 percent went toward the Southampton Naval Annex, now referred to as Morgan’s Point.

There is no ducking the fact that there is costly work to be done here. If the Americans aren’t going to do it, no matter how you shuffle the figures around, $65.7 million, less the $11 million they gave us for the bridge, plus allowance for five years’ worth of inflation, is going to have to come out of Bermuda’s hide.

JA Jones identified “significant areas of environmental contamination” that require remediation before they are safe to reuse. These include the Bassett’s Cave complex at Morgan’s Point; dilapidated, asbestos-filled buildings; and the majority of the 134 underground or aboveground abandoned oil storage tanks.

They warned that pollution at Bassett’s Cave extends close to 75 private wells and close to the Port Royal fresh water lens, which supplies households in the western third of Bermuda. Quite apart from the oil and other waste in the cave, there was evidence of the presence of extensive quantities of toxic metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, chromium and copper.

Bermudians will understand that this is not something the PLP Government can ignore. There are clear and significant threats to public health involved, and it would be the height of irresponsibility to ignore them or cut corners during the remediation process.

We have no fairy godmother to wave her wand and make this go away. If a potential developer offers to clean it up, he is not doing so out of the goodness of his heart. He’s not going to take it out of his profit, nor is he going to spend outright the money required for the cleanup. There is only one other place it could come from, and that is from you and me, through some sort of concession, made by the PLP Government on our behalf. 2. The Negotiations.When negotiations began with the Americans, they took the position that when they abandoned the baselands, Bermuda would owe them a huge sum of money for the value of the buildings and the facilities they left behind. This was known as the residual value claim. By putting it on the table, they made it clear to us that they had no intention of paying for any environmental damage done during their 44 years of occupation. In other words, what they owed us for damages was balanced by what we owed them for facilities.

The reason for their hard-nosed approach was that, at the end of the Cold War, they closed not just bases in Bermuda and the United States, but bases all over the world, including Britain. Some of these foreign bases, to judge by the Press stories at the time, had been treated very badly indeed. If the US had paid for all the damage they caused, it would have cost them tens of billions of dollars.

So they held fast against claims to clean up their base properties. Their residual value claim was a kind of economic first-strike, to protect themselves.

It was obvious to the UBP Government that what we had to do was make a case that Bermuda was special, deserving of being singled out for better-than-normal treatment for two good reasons: One, the 1941 US Bases Agreement was unique in the world (apart from two Canadian bases), and two, the bases here were established specifically to defend the East Coast of the United States. We also believed we were less likely to succeed in making our case through the British Government. They had their own problems with US base closures in the UK. We were concerned that Bermuda would go into the British mix and become, even with the best of British intentions, very much a secondary concern.

We reasoned that the best thing we could do was appeal to the large number of friends we had made over the course of many years of dealing with US lawmakers, especially those on Congressional committees that had the power to change the situation. We believed we should lobby directly and relentlessly.

So we did. We put a great deal of time and effort into our lobbying campaign. American lawmakers were horrified by what we were able to tell them, and show them, about their military’s mistreatment of our environment. We were making slow but steady progress, and we were successful in getting passed a number of amendments to bills that called on the US Navy to reconsider its position on the Bermuda baselands. Readers may remember that just prior to our base closures, Canada lodged a claim against the US over environmental damage at former US bases on its soil, including Argentia and Goose Bay. Canada was the country most likely to be considered a special case and receive some form of compensation, and its bases agreement with the US closely paralleled Bermuda’s. For this reason, we received sound advice that it would be advantageous to wait until the Canadians settled their claim and then to press ours in its wake, hard. When that time came, we would have had some of the most important and influential lawmakers in the American Congress on our side. In fact, the Canadians did receive a handsome settlement, not in cash, but in military credits worth $100 million. But by that time, the UBP Government was out of the loop. Had the UBP Government continued to manage this issue, I am as certain as I can be that we would have achieved a satisfactory deal for Bermuda. It might not have been perfect, but it would have been a lot closer to perfect than the poor deal the PLP Government got for its efforts. After all, the UBP Government was successful in getting the UK to clean up the mess they left behind at HMS Malabar, and we got the US to spend $5 million to stabilise the shoreline around the US landfill near Clearwater Beach following severe environmental damage caused by Hurricane Felix in 1995. We anticipated that, as a minimum, we would come out of the negotiations with the US assuming responsibility for cleaning up Bassett’s Cave, disposing of the 25,000 tons of asbestos and paying for a new Longbird Bridge. We would have been somewhat disappointed with that result, but we thought it was achievable.

Dealing with the bases has cost Bermuda substantial sums of money already. We have paid for services once provided by the US military. We have paid for environmental assessments and some environmental remediation that couldn’t wait. And we have paid for our negotiation efforts. When you add it all up and set it against the $11 million the PLP Government extracted from the Americans, you can only conclude that Bermuda has come out of it with nothing to show for our efforts.3. What Went Wrong.The PLP Government’s approach to the base negotiations has been unfocused; three Ministers have held responsibility in three years. And their ideology and inflammatory rhetoric have stood in the way of practical, good-faith negotiations. Readers might remember the astounding moment in 1999 when Minister Terry Lister — who at the time held responsibility for baselands negotiations — claimed in the House of Assembly that there was no moral leadership in the United States, accused the US Government of murdering black men and declared that Pentagon officials-those very officials with whom he was negotiating-kill people for a living. Is it any wonder Bermuda got so little from the US in the end? Sometime after the PLP Government was elected, they handed back responsibility for negotiating with the US to the British. I don’t believe the PLP Government was ever comfortable lobbying US lawmakers or confident in their ability to succeed. So they turned to the British and said: “Here, you handle this for us.” I said earlier that the UBP Government thought this was a mistake. The British and the Americans have a complex, multi-faceted relationship. To throw Bermuda into the mix condemned us to be merely one of many considerations, not the focus of the negotiations. The PLP Government should have known better than to let the British take on this responsibility. In doing so, the PLP Government abdicated their sworn responsibility to represent and defend the interests of Bermuda. They should have known — known in their hearts if not in their heads — that the people who can best represent Bermuda are Bermudians. Faith in ourselves as a people always anchored the UBP Government’s approach to the bases transition. It’s too bad the PLP Government did not have that faith and the tenacity to stay the course for a just settlement. The PLP should be ashamed. They performed very poorly, and now Bermuda is stuck with a bad deal that will cost us dearly for years, perhaps even for generations. 4. Four Years of Wasted Development Opportunity.<$>By 1998, following an extensive and open tendering process, the UBP Government and the BLDC had negotiated a promising development deal for Morgan’s Point. But Minister Lister cancelled it. We have always suspected that he would have done anything rather than put his seal of approval on a deal made under the auspices of the UBP Government. We don’t believe he cared about the fact that the deal promised to jumpstart Bermuda’s tourism industry, anchor the Island’s construction industry for five or more years, employ hundreds of Bermudians and restore and beautify an important part of Bermuda. Minister Lister may well have thought that if we could do it, he could do it better. But he soon found out how mistaken he was. The record shows how badly he misjudged not only the situation but also his own Government’s abilities to manage it. For a while, he kept saying he had found another group to take over. One minute there was a group, then there wasn’t, then there was again. A deal was always near at hand. And now Minister Alex Scott is serving up the same kind of wild speculation in the Press.

But, as the saying goes, watch what they do, not what they say. The truth is simply that, after four years of PLP Government, ground has not been broken at Morgan’s Point. Four years of opportunity have been squandered. There is clearly a need for dynamic, visionary leadership to develop Morgan’s Point, and this PLP Government does not have it. 5. Where must we go from here?We are stuck — for now — with a PLP Government that has not offered a single, rational clue, let alone a comprehensive and logical plan, about how they intend to proceed to clean up the environmental damage on the baselands. Instead, Minister Alex Scott has spun so many different stories about who’s going to pay he’s completely lost his credibility. He says the UK should pay because they did a lousy job representing Bermuda’s interests in the negotiations. But the Deputy Governor pointed out that the deal was negotiated with the full knowledge and involvement of the PLP Government. Minister Scott says the US might still come through with unspecified regiment training programs. That doesn’t do much to clean up the pollution. He says an unspecified developer might pick up the cleanup cost. Well, I’ve already addressed that bit of wishful thinking.

We call on the PLP Government to come clean about the cleanup. How are they going to do it? Who’s going to do it? When are they going to get it done? What will the price tag be? The health of our people, the quality of our environment and future economic opportunity are all at stake. For Bermuda’s sake, I hope the PLP Government answers carefully.