THE Negril Environment and Protection Trust (NEPT) are no longer managers of the Royal Palm Reserve, the 300-acre ecological tourist attraction in the western resort town.

The decision was taken after the entity failed to pay up the $2.1 million in lease payments it owes to the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ), which owns the property.

“Basically we had some outstanding lease payments for them and we were not able to clear it,” NEPT’s executive director Maxine Hamilton told Environment Watch on Monday. “When we met, they advised us that if we cleared the lease payment and provided a plan as to how we could proceed then they would be willing to negotiate. It was not a definite thing, but at least we would have been able to go back to the negotiating table.

“We have done several fund-raisers, lobbied several groups and we just were not able to come up with that money,” she added.

NEPT was last year served with a notice to quit, which became effective on July 27.

Their loss of control of the management of the facility is a development the NEPT team regrets.

“We are very disappointed,” Hamilton said, adding that a number of projects that were being undertaken at the reserve are now effectively at an end.

Those projects include the development of a water level management and fire emergency plan for the morass, which has been drying over the years and is therefore prone to fires.

“We just have to reorganise ourselves and look at how we can approach the thing in a different way because the work that we are doing is essential, so we have to continue,” Hamilton said. “It is just that right now we have to revisit our strategy. It is critical for us to rehydrate the morass to cut down on the number of morass fires we have.

“The other projects are the improvement in the interpretation of the biodiversity of the Negril area because that would have sensitised locals and visitors to the importance of the area and assist us… to conserve what it is that we have here,” she added.

There is also concern, Hamilton said, for the programme they had running for the West Indian Whistling Ducks.

“The number (of West Indian Whistling Ducks) … (at the reserve), based on the Society for the Conservation and Study of Caribbean Birds, represents approximately two per cent of the world population. This area is one of the best places in the world to view them because of how they have been socialised. We protect them by feeding them corn to prevent them from going out into the wild to get hunted or their eggs and young ones being killed by mongoose. We also have a mongoose trap that we were using,” she said.

“So we are concerned about that and we have expressed that to the PCJ and I know they are trying to do something to deal with it,” Hamilton added.

There is also the vegetation management programme that was geared at ensuring invasive plant species did not out-compete endemic species.

“What that programme would do is remove invasive plant species from the reserve because those plant species basically take over the entire landscape and smother endemic and important plant species at the reserve,” she noted.

Meanwhile, Hamilton has advised that the next set of managers run the facility in such a way as to allow for its preservation over the long term.

“Whatever happens, the reserve must be managed for conservation; it cannot just be for commercial gain,” she said. “In terms of the value of the reserve to the Negril community, whatever is there must be conserved. You cannot have things there to be used just for commercial gain and then you lose the importance of what we have here in Negril.”

As to the debt, NEPT will have to settle it.

“It is a debt and we have not cleared it, and I don’t think it has been pardoned with the notice to quit,” Hamilton said.

The PCJ has, in the interim, started to advertise for new management of the reserve.