Parliament to Debate Southern Deepwater Port Development Bill – Love FM Belize News & Music Power

Lawmakers will convene the House of Representatives tomorrow to introduce several important bills. One of them is the Southern Deepwater Port Development Facility Bill of 2024. The bill is related to the Commerce Bight Terminal and will provide certain benefits, namely tax exemptions. Dangriga Regional Representative Dr. Louis Zabaneh said this is a crucial step for residents of the area as the facility has been out of service for more than a decade and could be beneficial in the areas of development and employment.

Dr. Louis Zabaneh, Dangriga Regional Representative: “The Commerce Bight port, which is located at the southern end of Dangriga, about 1.5 miles south of Dangriga, has been closed for more than two decades and our people have been urging for the port to be reopened. In the case of the Commerce Bight port, the Prime Minister wisely set up a subcommittee of three ministers to look into the matter in detail and it has now reached the stage of submitting a bill on Thursday, when the details of the bill will be discussed, but the people of Dangriga are excited about it and we are very grateful that things have come to this point because on November 19, 2022, all the media who interviewed me about the port, I told them what we knew at the time, which was that it was intended for small cruise ships, the so-called luxury cruise ships, with a passenger capacity of between 150 and 500. The difference is that the people on these ships stay longer, they are mostly retirees with higher disposable incomes, and they spend five to six times more than the people on the big ships. Of course, they also expect a higher quality of service. So the multifunctional part is related to this because during the construction process, we have developed some projects and we will continue to work closely with ITVET, with BIL, which I founded. “We’re working closely with the Commerce Bight Institute, which is working on leadership, development and all of these areas, including business development, entrepreneurship, and so on. Because we want the people of Dangriga to be at the forefront of all of this. So that when you go to restaurants, when you go to stores, you’ll see them, and they’ll be showing tourists around. So we’ve had about a year to prepare. We’ve been telling our people that we need to be well prepared because if you imagine two or three of these little boats in Commerce Bight, those three boats might have a thousand people on them at the same time. We have to be able to provide services to these people and, of course, benefit financially so that it directly affects the quality of life of our people.”