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For decades, Anegadian families have applied for Crown land titles to ancestral land they have lived on, built on, and buried their loved ones on for generations. The process should have been straightforward. It was not. What follows is the documented account of how a community that did everything right was systematically failed by the very institutions created to serve them.

The Anegada Advisory Land Committee was established to process Crown land applications on behalf of Anegadian residents. When the committee submitted applications correctly and in accordance with the criteria in force at the time, those applications were returned by the Ministry of Natural Resources, Labour and Immigration citing the absence of notarized vital documents. The committee sought guidance. It was the District 9 Representative and Minister for Natural Resources, Labour and Immigration, Hon. Vincent Wheatley, who directed that applicants notarize their vital records, including Birth, Marriage, and Death Certificates, through the District Officer. The District Officer was personally reassured by Minister Wheatley that the criteria were lawful and above board, despite her own reservations about the arrangement. She was directed to proceed. She did. From that point forward, Anegadian applicants notarized their vital documents, paid their fees, and submitted their applications under a framework established by ministerial direction. They did exactly what they were told to do.

The 2023 BVI general elections brought a change of ministerial name to the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Climate Change and a committee name change from the Anegada Advisory Land Committee to the Anegada Land Development Advisory Committee. At the outset of the new ministry, a public press announcement was made that the Anegada land saga would be resolved by December 2023. That commitment was placed on the public record and received by the Anegadian community with cautious hope. The ALDAC continued processing resident applications in good faith, submitting them under the notarization framework that had been established under the previous ministerial direction. Behind the scenes, however, the committee began encountering resistance that made its mandate increasingly difficult to carry out. Key documents formally requested by ALDAC, including approximately 650 application files held by the Ministry that were required under the committee's Terms of Reference to be transferred for processing, were consistently denied. ALDAC was prevented from providing meaningful input into the Crown Lands Policy and the Crown Lands Management Bill despite the Premier's own instruction that the committee participate. Agreed positions between the committee and Ministry leadership were removed from the drafting process without consultation. Stipends owed to committee members for their public service were withheld. The December 2023 deadline came and went without resolution, without a single new title issued, and without an explanation offered to the community that had been promised an end to their wait.

At the end of the ALDAC's tenure, committee members were called to a meeting attended by Premier Dr. Natalio Wheatley, Deputy Premier Hon. Lorna Smith, representatives of the Crown Land Unit, and the Attorney General's Chambers liaison to MENRCC, Ms. Maya Barry. It was at that meeting that ALDAC members learned the truth about the framework under which they had been operating. Ms. Barry disclosed that a law enacted in 2012 made it illegal to notarize vital documents in the British Virgin Islands. Every local application submitted under the notarization framework established by ministerial direction was null and void. Ms. Barry further disclosed that she had personally informed MENRCC senior management of this illegality in early 2023, approximately twelve months before the end of the committee's tenure. That information was never communicated to ALDAC. The committee had continued processing applications. Applicants had continued paying fees and submitting documents. The Crown Lands Unit had continued inspecting and signing off on every submission. All of it was void, and the people responsible for informing the committee of that fact had chosen silence. A three-month extension was granted to update at least 50 applications to go before Cabinet. At that same meeting, the committee was also informed of something that had been sitting in the Ministry for years: 115 applications approved by Cabinet between 2009 and 2018 had never been processed by the Ministry. A decade of Cabinet-approved applications, the highest administrative sanction available in the BVI Government, had simply been left dormant.

In July 2024, ALDAC submitted the updated list of eligible applicants to MENRCC for processing. What followed was a further demonstration of the institutional treatment Anegada has come to know. After more than 20 months of waiting for the Cabinet paper to be forwarded from the Ministry to the Cabinet, committee members were informed that the Cabinet paper bore the wrong Governor's name. The paper listed Governor Rankin rather than the current Governor Pruce, a detail that exposed how long the document had sat untouched inside the Ministry before anyone moved it forward. The paper was returned to the Governor's office for correction. At that point, a representative from the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office within the Governor's office requested that the applications, already Cabinet-approved, be submitted to the Crown Land Advisory Board for approval. Applications that had already been approved at the highest level of government were being sent back to the beginning of a process they had already completed. Then, during a community meeting with Hon. Vincent Wheatley in January 2026, residents were informed that after the Attorney General's Chambers had been consulted, the advice received was that the entire application process should be restarted. From the beginning. After decades of applications. After fees paid. After documents submitted. After a committee constituted, obstructed, and disbanded. After a void framework established by ministerial direction. After 115 Cabinet approvals left dormant for over a decade. After a Cabinet paper with the wrong Governor's name. The advice from the Attorney General's Chambers, the same office that approved void Bates Hill lease transfers during the same period it now cites as the basis for its contrary view, is that Anegada should start again.