Rick Lowe

The new Straw Market is a disappointment, but not from the point of view the PLP. The government should never have built a premises for people to conduct private enterprise in the first place.

Of course the PLP think it should have been bigger than life with amenities like a movie theatre and restaurants etc. A monument to themselves using taxpayer money and are upset because the FNM got to build theirs.

To give the government a bit of credit, they are attempting to implement standards, which most would agree are abysmally low. See the results of a brief study commissioned by the Nassau Institute back in 2007 here…

However, the Straw Vendors, and now the PLP, are objecting to this too.

But standards like good personal hygiene and a clean and tidy premises are normal requirements for people serving the public. And if our tourists are as important as the PLP and FNM tell us, surely they should not be confronted by much of what was described in the study above. 

Now if the straw vendors or the PLP were paying for the market themselves, they could implement whatever standards they prefer of course. But the irony is, the government has spent over $10 million (or a lot more) of our money on this project and one wonders if the revenue generated from the vendors would even meet a mortgage payment and ongoing maintenance and property taxes, electricity etc if this was a private venture. In other words would it be a non-starter in the real world?

In fact, if the vendors were to provide premises for themselves I'd be willing to bet, it would look nothing like the building that has been provided for them.

Let's all look back at this "investment in our tourism industry" in twelve months and see the results at that point. Hopefully the vendors will make us all proud.