Today, Infrastructure Minister Eddie Noel, his Assistant Minister Deputy Richard Rondel and a phalanx of senior officers met with Deputy Jackie Hilton and Tony Legg of Jersey Sea Farms to talk about ways forward with Jersey’s sea lettuce problem.
**SOS J members were unfortunately not invited despite making it clear Dave Cabeldu and Jacqui Carrel would like to be there. Dave is chief researcher, and Jacqui is the team’s environmental scientist: we don’t know why they were not allowed to attend.
We will bring you more in due course but, in brief, we gather the Ministers and officers were very enthusiastic and appeared to have an ‘open door’ attitude to both interim and permanent proposed solutions to the sea lettuce problems.
The various States departments now have the information they need to get on with in order to start tackling the problem effectively.
We are happy to help with any information we have, but think that now is the time for both Departments to take charge, to utilise their own man power to do the job, and to use the knowledge and expertise provided by Tony.
Interestingly, although barred from today’s officials-dominated meeting, the authorities are keen that SOS J should spend more of their unpaid time on some related plans for the States to use. Hmm.
Nonetheless, we are very pleased that FINALLY the Island can start to make progress with an important project to help get sea lettuce levels back to where they used to be – like in the foreground of the picture below.
We would like to thank Tony Legg of Jersey Sea Farms for working flat out on this and for coming over at short notice, and Deputy Jackie Hilton for arranging and attending the meeting.