Mar 21 - Mid Harbours Residents Protest Against Amended Marriott Hotel Plans
Ahead of this afternoon’s Development and Planning Commission, at which the plans to develop a Marriott Hotel at the site of the former Royal Gibraltar Yacht Club are being discussed, the Mid Harbours Action Group have expressed their views on a gamut of matters relating to the Hotel and an office block also planned for the site.
Residents of Mid Harbours Estate have been particularly vocal in their disagreement with this project, which may see the multi storey hotel built directly in front of the estate. The Estate’s Action Group have claimed that the recently opened Sunborn Hotel and already approved hotel plans at the former Risso Bakery site, doubling the local hotel capacity and making it unnecessary for another hotel to be built in Gibraltar.
With regards to jobs for locals, the group insists that the Sunborn hotel also promised new jobs for locals, but in reality only 12 jobs have been given to locals.
The group asks that the developers implement ‘intelligent town planning’ in order to ‘segregate residential and office space, so residents’ quality of life is not affected.’ They added that those living in the area were promised availability in the Commonweal Park underground parking, and now parking spaces are slowly being removed and not replaced.
They go on to note that the developer’s redesign of the plan ‘makes a mockery of Gibraltar’s Town Planning Commissioners and Gibraltar as a whole’. The group collected 1700 signatures in December in a petition against the project. The DPC is set to review the developers’ amended plans of the project this afternoon.
