New Land Policy under consideration in Turks and Caicos
In discussions of the country’s most valuable asset, land, Governor Gordon Wetherell noted that the TCI economy suffered significant losses from the unsustainable sale of large tracts of land by the former Government.
He announced, “To address this we have begun work on a new Crown Land Policy. This will be the subject of consultation soon. We are also restoring order to the Crown Land Unit where systems had virtually collapsed. This had resulted in the accumulation of uncollected arrears of over $3m for conditional purchase leases. We have completed an arrears identification exercise and put in place procedures to begin proceedings to recover unpaid arrears - money that the Government could be spending to the benefit of all people in TCI,” he said.
“We are also dealing with the backlog of cases left in the Land Registry and have already processed several hundred applications dating back many years. We have been cleaning the existing database and computerized a significant number of Land Registry records, to speed up access to information and service delivery and to ensure a more accurate assessment of stamp duty,” the Governor added.
(resource: SunTCI)