New Contract For Land Project

Mr. Christie presided over the signing on Monday of a $2.3 million contract between the government and the Peter Rabley’s International Land Systems (ILS), aimed at rectifying exactly that inefficiency.

"One of the vexing problems facing The Bahamas is the question of the Government of The Bahamas being sufficiently efficient and effective in responding to the needs of people nationwide who have applied for land, who require the land for their residences, for their businesses, and who have had to wait an inordinate degree of time," he said.

Mr. Rabley’s company will conduct a 16-month consultancy, at the end of which Mr. Christie said he expected to see, among other things, the design, development and installation of a computerized Parcel Information Management System (PIMS).

ILS will ultimately create a computer-based land registry, allowing people to go online and see the land itself, the owner of the title for the land, and the value of the land.

The new PIMS will include about 70,000 properties on the islands of New Providence and Grand Bahama, to be registered in the Department of Lands and Surveys, the Registrar General’s department, and other agencies.

ILS is also expected over the next year and a half to complete a comprehensive analysis of overriding land issues in The Bahamas, including land tenure security, reform and modernization of land legislation, the improvement of land valuation and the improvement of real property tax administration.

The other technical activity in the study is the modernization of the geodetic infrastructure for the islands of New Providence, Grand Bahama, Andros, Abaco and Great Inagua.

The geodetic infrastructure Mr. Christie spoke about refers to a harmonization of the old mapping system with the latest technology so that a person looking at GPS coordinates, for example, will be in the right place according to those coordinates.

Franklyn Kemp, controller of Inland Revenue and Chief Valuation Officer, explained that the new geodetic system and the PIMS would allow aerial review of all parcels of land, and how improved that land might be. Mr. Kemp added that the level of improvement on a parcel of land determines how government taxes the owner of that land.

"To be able to identify all parcels, and the true owners of all parcels, which is a weakness, I don’t know how they are going to get through that; that’s a very difficult thing considering places like Nassau Village where land may have been passed, three and four times, the same land to different people, so that makes it a little more difficult," Mr. Kemp said.

"But certainly I think that the parcel index will be a really good place to start for land management."

Registrar General Shane Miller was also enthusiastic about this new project, which he said is the first step to a land title registry.

"The idea is that all the relevant government departments, including the Registrar General, which deals with title registration and conveyancing documents, we will be able to be tied in with all of the key agencies of this project, to the point where current land issues that now plague The Bahamas will be a thing of the past," Mr. Miller said.