Mitigating the Issues of Land Compensation

Cordel Hyde

Minister of Natural Resources Cordel Hyde also spoke on the issue of huge compensation payouts for lands and possibly enacting laws to prevent future incidents. As we’ve reported in the past, land titles have been issued to persons for parcels that were already privately owned. G.O.B. would then be compelled to issue compensation at the market value of the property, which in some cases is hundreds of thousands of dollars in payout.  Minister Hyde says that it is a vexing issue that they have been trying to mitigate.

Cordel Hyde, Minister of Natural Resources

“We’ve been wrestling with this thing for a while; it’s a vexing issue and again, the constitution guarantees that if you own your land privately, then government cannot just take it away from you without compensating you. We have our legal counsel right at this moment looking at coming up with ways to mitigate and reduce government’s exposure when these kinds of things go wrong. Our legal counsel is working very hard on that. But in the process of trying to finesse the law and coming up with a law that is workable and constitutionally acceptable, we have to deal with these litigations every single day – cases keep popping up where duplications and the claims are exorbitant. They are painful to even consider. I try not to think about them too much because they gonna overburden you. They gonna pull out hair that I don’t have, that I don’t have.”