So, Prime Minister, I had a feeling you would show up in Woodford before long. Every politician eventually finds his way everywhere when an election begins to draw near.
But what brought you this particular Sunday? Was it the revealing – perhaps somewhat embarrassing – GLA article Who Approved This? with those disturbing photographs showing a public road diverted through private industrial property leaving residents without proper access to their homes?
Or was it simply the visit Woodford had been waiting more than a year for?
When the Rayneau development was still in its infancy, residents wrote asking for your intervention. We told you there had been no meaningful community consultation and asked Government to consider moving the industrial operations farther away from homes.
We wrote again. No response. And now, finally, you come.
You met Mr Hector, in Brooklyn, formerly part of the Woodford Estate. Mr Hector, as anyone who has seen him on the Bubb Report knows, does not pull punches. Did he bring up the mauvais langue and bacchanal comment? That one hurt.
During the March 2025 Budget debate, while Woodford residents were raising concerns about an industrial development being established beside their homes, you labelled the worry as “noise, mauvais langue, and bacchanal.”
More recently, when questions were raised in your post Cabinet press briefing, about the destruction of the Mt Dor road, you suggested that people linking what was happening to Rayneau were making mischief.
Mauvais langue. Bacchanal. Mischief.
According to Mr Hector’s account, you eventually expressed regret about speaking without having all the information. If so, Prime Minister, there is a simple question:
Would you say that publicly to the Woodford community, as Mr Hector seems to have advised you.
We understand that you again raised the fact that Rayneau is operating on private property. Prime Minister, I thought we had put that one to rest.
Private property does not mean private consequences. If dust and noise enter people’s homes, they don’t remain private. If runoff enters rivers and the sea, it doesn’t remain private. And if excavation, vegetation removal or other activity contributes to instability affecting a public road, farms or homes, saying “private property” answers nothing.
That is precisely why Grenada has a Planning and Development Authority to regulate development on private property.
Older residents remember gliricidia being planted along the Mt Dor road to help hold the banks. Many of us have cross drains to the back of our homes and check constantly for loose boulders that may come crashing down.
We did not worry about the concrete in our driveways going through violent paroxysms that one property owner asked if an earthquake had passed.
Naturally we were alarmed by the extensive clearing and excavation. Later it was the boulders being removed, from everywhere there was a boulder – but most worrying, along the road edge. Wrote about that in the weeklies, Prime Minister, didn’t you read it?
Then the road beside the development failed in multiple places. Mr Hector puts it simply: the road didn’t slide; it collapsed.
Christelene Henry