Published: Wednesday October 8, 2008
Kevin Kenny regards himself as an environmentalist in the best sense of the word.
He's also one that other environmentalists just don't get.
It's easy to see how others might see a disconnect between Kenny's career path and his passion.
His academic training for one, seems to point in another direction.
Kenny, 58, has a degree in Marketing with a minor in Finance.
His career also took another path. He's owned his own construction business, worked at a pest control company and accepted a senior marketing position at Laventille-based spirits producer Angostura Ltd in 1993.
For the past six years he has been working on getting a massive, multi-million dollar resort off the ground in Tobago for the business units of the CL Financial conglomerate.
But he recalls that from the time "I was a young boy, I loved nature. I walked every trail in Trinidad and Tobago".
He tells the Business Express that even today, he remains a strong environmentalist and it is one of the traits that has remained consistent throughout this career.
This is where environmentalists Kenny refers to as "purists" get bewildered.
Kenny has spent the past six years taking on the challenge of developing more than 600 acres of land from Canaan to Buccoo in Tobago into an international resort and exclusive housing development on real estate that at least a few environmentalists would like to see left untouched.
In an interview at his CL Permanent, Port of Spain office, Kenny disagrees with this ideology and argues his case as the best man for the job.
"I've always been a person who understands the problem of sustainability and the balance between man and the environment," he tells the Business Express from his St Vincent St office. "I'm not sure what the environmentalists think of me because they find I have problems with the purists in the environment, those who want to lock away the environment while my view is to find a way to live with nature."
Kenny says there are some who think Tobago's fairly unspoilt areas should be left untouched.
"But people felt that way about Tobago Plantations too," he says, referring to the vacation home, golf course and hotel project at Lowlands.
"My view is that you get sensitive people to develop sensitive land instead of just leaving it, or leaving it to get developed by someone who is not sensitive to nature or somebody who is not as skilled," he adds.
Using land owned by insurance company Colonial Life and builders Home Construction Ltd- both members of the CL Financial group- Kenny is managing the resort development on 650 acres.
The Estates at Golden Grove and Buccoo project will cost more than US$1.5 billion over the 12-20 year construction period set over several stages.
Kenny has found another challenge to spend his time: He has taken over as president of the Trinidad Hotels, Restaurants and Tourism Association for the next two years.
He is the first allied company member to take over at the helm of the association and intends to raise the bar in terms of what the group can accomplish.
"I'm more interested in resolving structural problems within the tourism industry," he says, adding that Trinidad and Tobago has not yet wrapped itself around the concept of tourism as one of the financial pillars of the economy.
"If we truly want to become serious about tourism we need to put various mechanisms in place to promote that."
Kenny believes that Trinidad and Tobago is both blessed and cursed with oil and gas.
Blessed in the sense that it continues to be the country's primary moneyspinner but cursed because it also "dominates our thinking".
"It's a very human issue and it takes a lot of long-term thought and vision to understand what we have to put in place to understand that when the oil runs out it is important to have another industry."
The service industry is an obvious one as it caters to the employment of a large numbers of people.
Kenny says it is interesting to see the country developing its information technology and international financial centre areas.
It is also critical that the country has not had to exploit its natural resources like other Caribbean territories and it has an opportunity to not make those mistakes in tourism while at the same time developing an industry that can lead to sustainability.
"The fundamental challenge in front of me is to find a way to get investments built in Trinidad and Tobago," Kenny says. My vision is Trinidad and Tobago - one country, two islands."
He agrees that if more infrastructure geared towards tourism is to be established, one has to work with the Government to get more airlift and more hotel rooms in places like Tobago.
"Part of the solution also entails thinking and working outside the box in terms of developing ideas to propel the sector forward.
People with good intentions tend to get trapped in the safe environment. But if we are going to change the tourism environment, we have to look outside the box, that really is perhaps the biggest challenge because out-of-the-box thinking is not a safe place, failure is high but there is no question in my mind that is where the solutions are," he tells the Business Express.
This could also mean amending legislation such as the Tourism Development Act which was once a dynamic document but has now become irrelevant because of competition from other tourist hotspots.
"Today, our incentives (for development) are irrelevant, they are the least attractive today whereas they were the most attractive eight years ago," Kenny argues.
The Tobago House of Assembly budget document has less than one page devoted to tourism, an industry that generates 90 per cent of the island's revenue.
In the national budget document, Kenny says there are references to tourism but there is only one capital project listed while there are numerous ones scheduled for development in the energy sector.
"There is a huge disconnect between the words and action. But I think tourism is the greatest industry in the world and we mean to correct that disconnect," he says of his association.
Source: Trinidad Express Newspapers
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_business_mag?id=161384868
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