B.E.L. says it’s two years behind on Chalillo

While the environmentalists are going back to their corner to regroup after the Supreme Court ruled against them on Chalillo, B.E.L. is getting ready to move ahead with its plans. According to C.E.O. Lynn Young, his company might have won a legal victory, but the country has taken an economic loss.

Lynn Young, C.E.O., B.E.L.

“You probably won’t see anything on the ground for another year. The process to continue, we have to have the public hearing, which we hope to have next month; we need to get a contractor, and he will probably need a few months to mobilise and get everything together, by which time the first rainy season will be on us. So there probably won’t be a lot of work on the ground until early 2004.”

“Any which way, I think we have lost because the whole project has been delayed two years. We are now behind on our planning, we are short in capacity, we are pushing hard to try to get the gas turbines installed, we’ve been having meetings with Mexico because they are having capacity problems, they have had a lot of growth over there, and they are telling us that they might have to cut back on supply to us if they cannot get certain emergency measures in place. So I think in all the delays have already begun to hurt the country as a whole, not just B.E.L.”

According to representatives of the Belize Alliance of Conservation N.G.O.’s, they will appeal Chief Justice Conteh’s ruling and are planning to use the public hearings scheduled for January to lobby public support.