Wallblake Airport resident and businessman, Calvin Lake, welcomes the expansion and development of the runway and facilities there, but regrets that he [and others] will be displaced in the process.

A section of the large ABC Supplies business area

Lake started constructing his family house just north of the eastern end of the airport in 1971 and took up residence there in 1975 among a very fruitful garden. Over five years ago he established the thriving and large building material supply business – ABC Supplies taking in his and other family property. Now with the planned airport expansion, his building is one of a number of other buildings which will have to be relocated.

“”I welcome the expansion of the airport once Government deals with me and my business reasonably,” he told The Anguillian. “I would like to see the development of the country and I would cooperate with the Government, but they must also deal fairly with me too.”

He spoke of some issues relating to the separation of the business area from the other portion of the property which still have to be settled. “With the expansion, to move me will cost me between five hundred thousand and a million dollars. That’s for me personally to spend because, when you look at fencing and I have to buy land,” he stated. “Separating the business and the house would mean I would have to buy land plus I would have to build a building and to hold the materials that I have in my aunt’s house along with a structure I put up there [on the aunt’s land]…
“The part of it that I am concerned about, that would cost be between five hundred thousand and one million dollars is to prepare for moving the business,” he emphasised. He said there were two areas where he would like to re-establish his business, but did not disclose them and added that “we still have certain problems to sort out.”

Calvin Lake

Mr. Lake, who is known to be a very calm and polite gentleman, reiterated that he understood the need to expand the airport runway and welcomed it but he stressed: “Government must deal with me reasonably. The expansion of the airport cost money and they must first sort me out seeing that I have a business also.”
There are some fifteen privately-owned buildings and forty landowners to be affected by the planned expansion of the airport. In his budget address in December last year, Minister of Finance, Victor Banks, stated in part: “perhaps the most critical allocation included in the proposed 2003 Capital Expenditure is $2.4 million for the payment of compensation to land owners for the acquisition of their land and buildings, be their homes and places of business for the extension of the Wallblake Airport runway.”
It has now been stated by representatives of the Airport Project Board that the above amount was not a final figure and was being revised.

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