By TRAVIS CARTWRIGHT-CARROLL Managing Editor

Copyright thenassauguardian

Bahamas Public Parks and Beaches Authority Executive Chairman McKell Bonaby has finally broken his silence about the authority’s $7 million budget overrun in the 2024/2025 fiscal year and deflected concerns about the poor state of parks on New Providence.

The government budgeted $24 million for the authority in the 2024/2025 fiscal year. However, between July 2024 and March 2025, the authority spent $31 million.

In June, during his budget contribution in Parliament, Bonaby failed to outline or account for the spending of the authority or why it exceeded its budget in the 2024/2025 fiscal year.

Instead, he spent his time lambasting the Free National Movement (FNM) and former Prime Minister Dr. Hubert Minnis over its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, The Nassau Guardian has featured nearly a dozen parks on New Providence with deteriorating or damaged playgrounds — many of which were fixed days after The Guardian featured them. Residents and members of the FNM questioned what the authority was doing with its money.

For months, The Nassau Guardian reached out to Bonaby via text and phone calls, but never received a response.

During an event hosted by the authority at Goodman’s Bay yesterday, Bonaby finally addressed the issue. It should be noted that The Nassau Guardian was not invited to the event.

“It may be a matter of semantics, but the fact of the matter is when we get to the mid-term budget, the government decides what it wants to do in terms of reallocation,” he told reporters.

“So, it’s a reallocation exercise. I don’t view it as an overspending exercise.”

Bonaby pointed to work he said was not done at the parks during COVID-19 when the FNM was in power.

“The fact of the matter is we felt that there should have been persons working on those parks during that period, but the buck stops here,” he said.

“So, there were many challenges…we had to deal with a lot of fiscal responsibility matters that were left undone. We had to deal with our funding. We had to deal with our audit reports. The authority has never tabled any audit reports since its inception.”

He added that people cannot simply look at “what is happening at parks and beaches myopically and simply say that, ‘Why isn’t this park done or that park done?’”

“I want to have a fulsome conversation regarding where parks and beaches is at,” he said.

“So I intend to do a media run. I intend to come to ZNS and other media houses to give a full account of everything which would have happened at parks and beaches.”

The government budgeted $29 million for the authority in the upcoming fiscal year, which starts on July 1.

In 2021, after taking office, Prime Minister Philip Brave Davis, then-Minister of Works Alfred Sears and Bonaby, pointed to budget increases in the authority under the Minnis administration in the lead up to the 2021 general election.

Davis said the authority’s budget increased, in the 2021/2022 fiscal year – from $15.2 million to a projected $37 million.

Sears said there was a “rash of contracts” issued by the Authority ahead of the September 16 general election, some without board approval.

Bonaby said the increase in contracts looked like “electioneering”.

“It looks like it,” he said in 2021.

“It walks like it. It sounds like it. And we can see the impact of it, where it was not a real financial decision that was being made. It appears to be a political decision.”