Remnants of an old sugar port at the Hampden Wharf in Falmouth, Trelawny. The Port Authority has hired Mott MacDonald to do a feasibility study on Falmouth for possible cruise development.

Lavern Clarke, Business Editor

The Port Authority of Jamaica has selected Mott MacDonald, a global engineering and design consultancy, to conduct a feasibility studyon Falmouth, to test the coastal town's suitability as a cruise port.

The US$248,150 (J$16.3 million) contract has hurdled National Contracts Commission scrutiny, appearing on the list of March endorsements. The next step is Cabinet approval - required for contracts above $15 million - prior to formal award to Mott MacDonald.

Falmouth is already positioned between two popular cruise ports - Montego Bay and Ocho Rios - but on Wednesday the Port Authority said tourism-related developments in the parish of Trelawny make it a suitable candidate for study when asked why the assessment was not being done on the south coast where no cruise infrastructure exists.

"We're constantly looking at the possibilities of our ports," said PAJ spokesman Pat Belinfanti.

The Port Authority, he said, constantly reviews its infra-structure in anticipation of market demand.

Pressure

It was unclear whether the Port Authority's decision to consider Falmouth for cruise development was informed by technical data from its engineers, or more of a concession to pressure from the town under its decade-old plan to market its culture to tourists.

The harbour is half a metre to 14 metres deep at various points, according to navigational charts. The wharf area, which lies close to the Martha Brae River on the town's edge, is among the shallow points, according to information from the Port Authority's Harbour's Department.

Belinfanti said the Mott Macdonald assessment would explore all possibilities including depth of the harbour, what size ships and berths it could accommodate, and the ease with which the vessels would be able to manoeuvre the waters.

This study, he told the Financial Gleaner, would not consider whether it would be commercially viable to place a cruise port in Falmouth, a town whose population crests 8,000 in a parish of some 74,000 inhabitants.

Belinfanti said the PAJ was also looking at other sites for possible cruise development - including Port Antonio's east harbour to accommodate large vessels of 1,000 or more feet.

Those plans were initially for the adjacent west harbour but the shallow basin as well as the rock formations there eliminated it as a viable port of call for the 1,000 to 2,000 feet behomoths, according to Belinfanti.

The west harbour now docks boutique cruise vessels.

Falmouth was once a streaming port for sugar exports.

The Hampden Wharf on the edge of the small town on the way to Ocho Rios is under consideration for development as a cultural attraction, plans that once included a slave museum.

The town, under wider development plans in the latter part of the 1990s, even had discussions with the Smithsonian Institution and other overseas bodies for technical assistance, laying the foundation for its economic transformation ahead of the North Coast Highway project, which would result in a bypass of Falmouth.

It was clear, even then, that Trelawny's sugar industry was in decline - the government-owned Long Pond was reported this year as the most inefficient of five factories up for divestment - giving impetus to the town to identify incom>Fearing the traffic diversion would kill Falmouth's commerce, the town, led largely by its Custos Roylan Barrett and the late Bill Ives, lobbied heavily for government to place it on a priority list for development, succeeding in having a section of the town declared a 'historic district', a first in Jamaica.

But Falmouth's wider ambition to redefine itself as a cultural tourism destination - spotted with cafes and characterised by walking tours of homes and structures preserved in their Georgian history, interspersed with the idea of redeveloping the wharf as a learning centre - remains bottled.

A positive assessment from United Kingdom based Mott Macdonald could give fillip to the plan, if tourists were to be landed in the town.

Belinfanti said several attractions were under consideration for Trelawny, but was not specific. There are however several large hotel properties to come on stream, but these would competewith rather than enhance a cruise plan.

Mott Macdonald operates or has projects in more than 140 countries of the world, including Jamaica. Its last job here was an engineering and management consultancy contract, also awarded by the Port Authority in November 2005, linked, the company says on its website, for the expansion of cruise terminal facilities in Montego Bay to enable the transfer of up to 3,500 cruise passengers per two-hour period.

lavern.clarke@gleanerjm.com