A few days’ recent strolling The Clifton Heritage National Park gave a sharp antidote to the grandiloquent opening ceremony last April and revealed a distressing truth: the Park is one of those well-meaning but fuzzy ideas that without rational planning have a hard time surviving in our tough competitive world.
I recall the stormy public meeting nearly ten years ago that caused the withdrawal of a foreign development group planning a typical gated resort community on the Point. Perry Christie’s Government then bought the land and created the Clifton Heritage Authority, embodying the principle of “Bahamian land for Bahamians.”
That’s a fine principle, deserving full respect. The only trouble is, where are the Bahamians?
In the course of checking out the Park over several sunny weekends and weekdays, here’s what I found: on the busiest holiday about 50 cars jammed the road down to Jaws Beach, with families enjoying the short sandy strip. But the Authority has done nothing to make it nice for them: just a few rotting piles remain of the dock destroyed in a long-past hurricane; the concrete boat ramp is incomplete, the beach is un-swept and no picnic tables or benches are provided; I saw no beach warden and found the door to the toilet facilities always locked. Just down the highway, the vast asphalt North parking lot one day held a single car, other days none. Bulldozed from the bush, it was designed to serve Jaws Beach, but lacking a direct path to the shore, nobody uses it.
Further down the road, hard work has been done to excavate and expose the Great House of the Wylly Plantation and the stone cottages of the slave settlement, but the restoration has been minimal and the buildings sat forlornly without any visitors visible all the days I passed by. The former Carriage House has been converted into an attractive Gift Shop, with a few interesting displays and local items for sale, but it’s shut on weekends – surely a perverse policy for a public park whose citizens are at work or school every week-day. These facilities plus the Park office and wardens’ quarters, together with trail entrances, are served by the pristine South parking lot, which was slightly better populated – as many as five cars.
As for interest in local ecology, when I often walked the few yards from Jaws Beach to the lovely pond in the preserved wetland zone, with three observatory boardwalks and handsome illustrations of herons, egrets and coots, I was the solitary observer. Covering the two-mile Arawak Trail that fringes the entire Point on a beautiful Sunday; I met exactly three Bahamian hikers – plus a friendly Park warden who told me that guided tours are only given only Monday-Friday because they’re “ intended mainly for tourists” (!). Fact is, it’s a pretty boring bush path, with few sea views. Neither it nor the Coppice Trail cutting diagonally through the forest display any signs to identify the surrounding trees, vines and shrubs. A billboard near Flipper Beach illustrates a Lucayan village, but there’s no physical evidence or artifacts to hold one’s interest.
Strangely, the Park does not take advantage of its highest elevation by creating what could be a spectacular outlook over the sea-side cliffs. The legendary Stone Steps, descending to the rocky shore under an arch, are so steep and narrow that, lacking any hand rails, they can be navigated only by the foolhardy. Worse, the Authority’s own publicity creates historical fiction. Both the sign at the site and the guidebook designed for Bahamian school children relate the myths that “during the plantation era, these Steps served as a gateway between Clifton and the rest of the world… across them passed the first slaves from Africa. and the last cotton exported to Europe ”. These undocumented fables ignore the hard evidence that the Steps were in fact dug in connection with a film production in 1916, an adaptation of “20,000 Leagues under the Sea.”
Clearly, Bahamians find the most popular attractions of the whole Park to be the swimming, snorkeling, and boating activities available at the still unimproved Jaws Beach. In the present state of development, it’s a good question how large a fraction of our population, outside the occasional organized school groups and National Trust expeditions, will trek the long drive west to appreciate the cultural and ecological offerings of the Park. The Great House and slave quarters alone are hardly worth a lengthy tour. There’s no food or drink offered anywhere (except sodas and candy at the Gift Shop), no playgrounds for kids, no tables with umbrellas, no music to be heard, no films, performances or pageants by natives in period costumes, no advertised festivals or lectures. There’s no sign of the promised tramway; no tour schedules are displayed. Much of the Park is “under construction” like its web-site, whose “News” section alertly displays a September 2005 press release as its latest item, and is blank under “Tours dates for 2009”.
I raised some of these issues with the pleasant people who staff the Park office. Many improvements, I was told, are “in development” and, understandably, “depend on funding”. Aye, “funding” – there’s the rub! Where’s it to come from? The Authority is a corporate body created by statute in 2004 after Government agreed to pay $19 million to the late Nancy Oakes to acquire 208 acres of Clifton Point, and probably a few million more was needed for the subsequent amenities, including the parking lots and clean-up of unsightly garbage along the shore-line.
These capital costs were funded with a $24 million issue of “Clifton Heritage Authority” bonds. With Government guarantee, principal and interest are a direct burden on the Treasury, since the Authority has no earnings of its own. All its requirements are met by Government subsidies and occasional gifts like the recent $10,000 donation from BTC. Eventually, the Authority should earn enough to pay at least part of its running costs. But how, in the absence of entrance fees? A possible source would be parking charges at the two big lots, where toll booths are already built. But Bahamians won’t start using the lots unless the expensive improvements are already in place – the usual financial dilemma.
One doubts there was any careful planning about continuing expenses, particularly the big new budget items needed to make the Park an attractive going concern. It was simply another project with a political agenda, backed by our well-intentioned but unrealistic culture mavens, including the do-gooder foreign organizations that give us advice but don’t understand Bahamian realities. Now, with Government expenditures stretched to the limit in the face of growing deficits, hard-headed Prime Minister Ingraham may decide that the worthy but unessential Park imposes drains on the Treasury that the State simply cannot afford. He won’t close it down, but may quietly tell the visionary Chairperson Sen. Dr. Jacinta Higgs that funding for all the hoped-for improvements must be put off to the distant future, if ever.
To become viable, the Park needs to have a publicity campaign (it’s not listed with tour operators) and a vigorous membership drive to provide consistent donations . Since its activities overlap with the Bahamas National Trust, perhaps the best solution would be to merge with the Trust, whose energetic leadership and long list of loyal members might find a way to pay for the Park’s aspirations and bring its dreams to reality. Even New York City’s famous Central Park had serious problems until the privately funded Central Parks Conservancy took over the Park’s management from the city government and now finances most of the operating budget. Without some similar answer, Bahamians will continue to swim at Jaws Beach, but the Clifton parking lots will sprout more weeds than cars. A national park that can neither pay its own way nor win popularity with its citizens does not have a bright future.
(I was unable to interview Sen. Higgs, who canceled a scheduled meeting)