Waterloo Investment Holdings is poised to become the next owner of the Port. They have a $200 million-dollar development plan to expand the facility with a deeper channel to accommodate bigger cargo ships. This company also wants to build a cruise terminal facility on the Port's property, and they say that the facility would accommodate shore-side berthing of cruise ships. You'll know that currently, Norwegian Cruise Line's Harvest Caye is the only port of call in the country that has a berthing facility for cruise ships. If this Waterloo development is allowed to take place, the upgraded Port of Belize would become the second.

Today, Dr. Dionne Chamberlaine of Chamberlaine Consulting, which is currently handling public relations and community consultations on behalf of the investors, hosted a 2-hour long video conference meeting with several media houses to introduce the project, which is currently at EIA phase.

Here's a short excerpt of that presentation in which Chamberlaine outlined a few elements of this proposed development for the Port:

Of course, the press used the entire duration of the video conference meeting to question the hosts on a wide range of topics surrounding this proposed development, including the possible environmental impacts. The media houses participating in the meeting were not allowed to record the session, and the hosts assured us that they would provide a recording of the entire meeting. But, perhaps predictably, they had some sort of technical failure on their end, and no recording was actually produced.