Business View Caribbean - November 2015 91
would move to a one-stop shop environment in a du-
al-level facility. You would have agents on the bottom
floor providing services to their customers and on the
top we will have customs, the Port Authority, and all
of the services that customers today have to visit six
different buildings for. With the new environment, we
believe, for the first time, we’re going to see an effec-
tive, competitive environment where it will not be the
Port Authority offering one service, but different agen-
cies competing to provide a wide array of services that
we, right now, don’t do because our business model
doesn’t really allow us to facilitate them.”
Working in a new port’s favor, according to Telemaque,
is not only its large size, but the fact that it was never
really developed on a broad scale. “We have wide-open
spaces that we can look at and create the type of en-
vironment that can facilitate not just the services that
we want, but we can structure it so that businesses
can be engaged and the neighboring islands can also
be facilitated,” he says. “We are looking to see how we
can utilize the space here to facilitate transshipment,
storage, and some light manufacturing, and then for-
ward those benefits to the neighboring islands.”
Finally, Telemaque believes that a new port facility will
help diversify and grow the Antiguan economy which,
for many years, has relied mainly on tourism. “Antigua
has done well with tourism, we love it and we want to
keep building on it,” he explains. “But tourism cannot
provide the total numbers of employment that would
create the macro-impact that the economy needs. The
tourism product is a six month period; it can’t absorb
the broader level of employment in the country. In di-
versifying and growing the economy we need to move
in different directions.”
