You have heard the saying, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. And some statistics are damn lies?”
As an engineer, I thought I was quite good at maths, but some of the figures being bandied about by the government have me confused.
They are building a new cruise ship facility and a new hospital, neither of which they can afford.
So they resort to persuading the public to cough up to help out, either by providing money for hospital departments or by investing in the cruise pier project. Of course, lots of other countries do this for their development projects, but they call it taxation! And it’s not voluntary! The next thing they will be asking us to do is to buy a foot of runway at the airport, or a packet of seeds for the greenhouses!
A far as the cruise pier investment goes, they are offering ridiculously high rates of interest (return) when banks offer at the most 1.05 percent (at the National Bank of the Virgin Islands) and more often much less than one percent.
Red light number one: If an investment looks too good to be true, then it probably is.
Red light number two: Notice the little caveat that says if in any year they don’t make enough profit then dividend payments can be deferred? If you have spare cash to gamble, that you don’t need, can afford to lose, and may not want back in a hurry, then go ahead and invest!
Red light number three: Do you see the rents for retail space? A ten-foot-by-ten-foot retail space is being rented for about $6,500-$9,500 per year. Government can’t, or won’t, enforce the little rents at Crafts Alive Village because renters say they don’t make enough. How many of them can you see applying for stalls at the new development? They will be scared off before they start. Why would anyone want office space there? To sell property to tourists?
Customer base
Now, let’s examine the customer base. Disney and Norwegian cruise lines promise 425,000 passengers a year at $15 a head. However, we now know that Disney will not be here in 2015, but we don’t know if NCL will provide 425,000 tourists in 2015. It’s unlikely, so does government get its money or not?
Come 2016, Disney will call 11 times with a 4,000-passenger ship (they only have two, with two other smaller vessels). That’s 44,000 passengers, of the 75,000 they promise, so they are already 31,000 down. That means NCL must bring 371,000. At a maximum of 4,000 per ship (a number that is by no means certain: They have 14 ships, only four of which have 4,000 capacity), that’s 92 ship calls. How are they going to meet that within the four-to-six-month cruise season? Despite what is said, they won’t be coming for 12 months as they move ships elsewhere with the seasons.
The extended pier will be 1,300 feet long. The big ships are over 1,000 feet long, so there can be only two ships per day at the pier: one on each side. Disney has priority on the east side four days a week (including Sundays, when we shut everything) and NCL has priority on the west side seven days a week. So that’s 8,000 passengers per day maximum, for 53 days solid. With only four ships, two of them small, it is obvious that Disney cannot fulfil its quota four days every week.
Doing the math
Now, by 2017, we are told, there will be 750,000 passengers per year. This figure must include the other cruise lines, which are probably mad at government for excluding them, and don’t relish having to anchor off shore and tender passengers in.
That’s more than 2,000 per day every day of the year: 4,000 per day for a six-month season, or even more. At most, a ship will call here only once a week for a few weeks, or once a fortnight on longer cruises, before they change their itineraries. So that’s seven giant ships once a week, or 14 ships if they come fortnightly. I am not sure what the world total of 4,000 passenger ships is (of all companies), but I bet there are not enough to provide what’s promised, even including the other lines.
That said, Lorie Rymer reportedly thinks we don’t have enough for visitors to do, and that there should be more nightlife. He must know ships don’t stay at night because they have to get to the next port by morning, and for safety they prefer to have passengers safely back on board in daylight.
Restaurants
Why do we think passengers will patronise four restaurants on the pier when they are five minutes away from superb free food on board?
Has Mr. Rymer heard of Old Government House museum, the 1780 Lower Estate Sugar Works Museum, the J.R. O’Neal Botanic Gardens, the new zip line, the dolphins, The Baths, biking, and all the water trips available?
Last word for taxi drivers: They need to install hands-free public address systems. Driving those buses one handed on our roads is extremely dangerous.
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