On the rental of overnight stays to tourists, the community takes a tax of 4% as much as our TGCA.
I realize by making the checks each month that this amount is far from negligible. I think that with the statistics of overnight stays or in official documents you will quickly find the total amount of this tax. The question is: what do they do with all this money raised? The official response is the promotion of tourism in ST Martin and the management of the tourist office. The tourist office since it was moved to the center of Marigot, I have not seen it. None of our customers, despite € 250 in turnover in overnight stays, have never been there and nowhere do we find documents from the tourist office. All communication for tourists, island maps, brochures ... is done by private companies through advertisements. Even if the tourist office does two or three shows a year like Paris, Miami, cruise lines and they probably publish a few brochures for operators, they don't count them. Where does all this money go?
Generally you will find that fortunately private companies are there and work hard. See what is done by the community for dynamism, the image of St Martin and what is done by the private sector. See the area of Orient Bay carbets, the awful containers of Marigot. Nothing works, everything is awful and abandoned.
In contrast, see the private restaurants in Orient Bay and even downtown Marigot and the Royal Marina. What dynamism, courage and results with these entrepreneurs.
The second point is the environment. We asked for an appointment with Pascale ALIX-LABORDE in charge of the environment on this subject who did not answer us.
Even having crisscrossed the roads of South America, a continent in almost permanent economic crisis like St Martin, for months, we have never seen such poor waste management and such a dirty environment (apart from a country that we do not not name). Realize that in St Martin there are holes like at MT Vernon 2 where people throw their waste and that others in charge pick it up with a fork…. Are we still in the middle ages in St Martin? Let tourists of all nationalities ask us if we sort the waste and that the answer is yes in theory but that the containers are either inaccessible (always look at MT Vernon 2) or almost always full in Orient bay. We are ashamed of it! We know that on this island crossed by cyclones the community helps to pick up bulky items that drag months after the cyclones and for that we can only thank her, but why not dumpsters and trucks suitable for picking up these skips rather than putting them all on the ground. Why does the community that occasionally communicates on the collection of bulky and green waste not put up a sign with the days near each collection point? Why not a recycling center near Orient bay - Hope Estate, the island's new economic heart. Do you think that a lot of people will waste nearly two hours in traffic jams to drop off this waste or bulky waste at the Marigot recycling center?
Besides that, we hear that Mrs. Pascale ALIX-LABORDE is traveling in metropolitan France to find out about buried garbage containers. There we laugh or rather we cry. It is completely irrelevant. What's more when you know the price, the technical constraints of these devices, their maintenance and the number of disputes that there have been in mainland France on these devices not at all adapted to our environment both in terms of maintenance that this requires and in terms of rainwater management which flood these devices and make them unusable from the first months.
In the environment there would still be a lot to say, everything to say… .. I would finish just again on the foul-smelling wastewater which flows in different places of the island as at the edge of the national at the level of the access from the path that leads to the King-Pneu garage. What does ARS do with these microbe and mosquito nests? Soon may be the return of cholera to France on the island of St Martin. X.
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