TOWN PLANNING ON FOX HILL CEMETERY | (DESPAIR AS FOX HILL MP FAILS TO ACT)

The residents of Johnson Estates which sits right at the back of where James Bain proposes to situate his new private cemetery were angry and frustrated.  She said that she wants to leave the country sometimes.  It appears she said whether PLP or FNM ordinary people do not get a break.  She said she had checked with a real estate agent and the agent had said that the moment that the cemetery is built, her home would be devalued by 13 per cent.  What could she do?  She had led a petition by the residents of her area and the surrounding Fox Hill constituency.  She had turned out with others to a Town meeting at the L W Young School on Tuesday 15 May but despite the vociferous opposition to the proposal, she had the impression that the Town Planning Committee headed by Diane Holowesko Dunkley had made up its minds.  She was furious that the petition that she spent so much time collecting and delivering was not in the records of the planning committee, with Charles Zonicle its Director saying that he had not received it.  She had delivered it herself.  The facts are of course that under the PLP the proposal to put a 13 acre private cemetery in the middle of a residential neighborhood in Fox Hill was turned down twice.  The main issue was the amount of traffic congestion that it would add to the neighborhood.  The applicant pooh poohed that and said everywhere in New Providence is traffic and you just have to live with it.  And so it went. A decision is to be made on Tuesday 22 May.  No one expects that the Committee will listen to the residents.  They believe the fix is in.  The applicant is a big FNM and the Committee of FNMs will simply give it the nod.  The lame MP for Fox Hill Shonel Ferguson showed up and the best she could offer was not support for the residents but simply to say that she wanted a traffic study done. So the residents have a choice, they can take to the courts if they like if the decision goes against them.  But what’s important to us is to register the despair of that woman of Johnson Estates about how her future is out of her control. And try as she might to work to save an inheritance for her son, she believes she is losing the game.