PHILIPSBURG:--- On Thursday, July 28th, 2016, the Prime Minister of Sint Maarten, William Marlin and a delegation from his ministry and of the ministry of VROMI met with the Prefete Deleguee of St. Martin and St. Barthelemy, Mrs. Anne Laubies and the representative of the Collectivite of St. Martin, Mr. Louis Fleming to discuss the progress of the Territorial Cooperation Programme for St. Martin/Sint Maarten 2014-2020.
The programme which is focused on environment and safety, consists of three main activities with the flagship project being the construction of a joint wastewater treatment plant in Cole Bay.
Certain proposed locations caused quite some concerns from the local community and as such the government of Sint Maarten in collaboration with the Prefet and the Collectivite of St. Martin have had a study carried out to have yet another look at the Sint Maarten West basin to consider other possible locations for the construction of the joint wastewater treatment plant.
This exercise to identify possible locations was successful and ended with a Multi-Criteria Analysis workshop involving a number of key stakeholders who evaluated a number of other options.
During the meeting on Thursday the findings were presented and further discussed. Negotiations with property owners will commence soon.
Further to this, the meeting established that the next step in defining the overall governance of the implementation of the programme could commence and it was agreed upon that the cooperation partners would begin this exercise as early as mid-August.