Feb. 23, 2009 — The U.S. House of Representatives Monday passed a bill authorizing the Interior Secretary to extend Caneel Bay Resort's operating agreement, which Delegate Donna M. Christensen said would keep St. John's largest employer viable.
The House passed a similar measure in March 2008, but it languished in the U.S. Senate. When the 110th Congress adjourned, the bill died.
Caneel Bay sits on 170 acres within V.I. National Park boundaries. While the resort owns the buildings, the park owns the land. The resort was opened in 1956 by Laurance S. Rockefeller, who along with others, donated land that formed the initial acreage of the park.
Christensen called the resort an important entity to the tourism-based economy of St. John and the Virgin Islands in general. In January she reintroduced the bill for the agreement, called a Retained Use Estate. On Monday, she made a case for the bill's passage to her colleagues.
"I have spent the past four years meeting with the National Park Service officials, representatives of the Rockefeller Group and various public officials and business partners to work out an equitable framework for a longterm agreement with the National Park Service, which will insure the viability of the Caneel Bay Resort, the largest employer on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands," Christensen said in her remarks to the House.
Caneel needs funding to make improvements to the property. In return for the agreement, the owners have agreed to pay "consideration" to the government based on independent appraisals commissioned by the parties, which will include valuable land and buildings held by them outside the park, Christensen said.
In a news release issued Monday, Christensen did not specify what the consideration would be.
The existing Retained Use Agreement will expire in 2023.
Christensen spoke of the urgent need to approve the agreement, telling her House colleagues that because of the tight economic conditions, the company is being forced to make some difficult decisions in trying to preserve its solvency so that it may survive the current economic downturn.
Caneel Bay has been in bankruptcy for about a dozen years.
Without the Retained Use Estate, Caneel Bay will revert to the park in 2023.
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