St. Maarten Private Eye

The excavation stopped after 2 years of irreversible destruction to the hillside. All heavy equipment is gone for a while now. The next phase should have been the start of construction but nothing is going on. That in itself is a plus as I have always been vehemently against the size of the Barbaron project. It is simply too big. Our infrastructure can not carry the additional weight it will bring. Rumor has it that the project is abandoned all together, that Carchidi ran out of money and that he couldn't find any investors to finance the construction phase. I predicted something like that would happen. The project is now for sale. Supposedly. Will it be sold? Nobody knows. It is not exactly the best of times to sell anything right now. Money is kind of tight these days.

Now my question is, what do we do in situations like this? Do we as a society accept that a developer destroys our landscape and then moves on as if nothing happened or do we retaliate? I find we should do the latter. Carchidi is to fix this or never to get any permit again on Sint Maarten. Not even a permit to reside here.

And government could learn a lesson too. Think about a policy that all future developments must put up a million dollar environment bond. The bond is to be returned if the project is completed without damage to the environment.
What happened here is not acceptable and we can't afford to shrug our shoulders and let it pass by.