This afternoon’s urgent Parliament meeting about long-lease land requested by opposition members promises to be interesting. Minister of Public Housing, Spatial Planning, Environment and Infrastructure VROMI Miklos Giterson is to debate what is owed in lease payments and related policies.
The reality is that the long-lease system, meant to promote people being able to build homes for all the right reasons, has been structurally exploited for decades. While there are conditions attached when government gives out the parcels of public land in question, these are often not complied with in practice.
Such provisions include strict residential, commercial or agricultural use, but also a time limit within which the intended structures are to be realised. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that many of these requirements are hardly – if at all – enforced in St, Maarten.
Long-lease rights are traded at will apparently without any restrictions regarding their original purpose. One way that came up in court is to sell “the economic value.”
Additionally, the arrears in lease payments over the years have reportedly grown to the extent that the money will be difficult at best to collect by now. Halting this considerable loss of income going forward is an obvious priority certainly under the current financial circumstances.
It’s really very simple: If the existing rules are adequate, they must be applied. Should that not be the case, change is needed.
There isn’t that much government property left to give out, which makes it even more important to somehow bring the practice back to strictly what it was intended for.
