Government's sustainable development initiative is at risk of being derailed ? because of the Government's own actions.

Opponents of the scale of the Loughlands development have rightly pointed out that the decision to grant a special development order for the property without submitting any plans or going through any form of public consultation flies in the face of both past practice and the principles enunciated in the Sustainable Development strategy.

Now Government and the Hospitals Board, having gone through an extensive consultation process over the siting of the new hospital, have decided to ignore the general consensus in favour of building the hospital on the current site and instead want the building put in the middle of the Botanical Gardens.

In the case of Loughlands, there was no consultation. In the case of the hospital, those who took the trouble to attend the meetings or to submit their thoughts will now feel it was a wasted exercise.

Sustainable development is all about choices. If there was a five-acre piece of open land waiting to be developed in the central parishes, then siting the hospital there would be easy.

There isn't, and all of the options proposed by the Hospitals Board had drawbacks. Building around the current site would no doubt take longer and be more expensive than on a "green site", but it was feasible ? and a good deal more feasible than the planners made out.

That's because the current hospital site, which includes the old and now virtually derelict old hospital building, the Springfield property on the corner of Berry Hill and Point Finger Roads and the area around the nurses residence, is larger than most people think, and much bigger than the current King Edward building.

On the other hand, building in the middle of the Botanical Gardens will not only effectively take Bermuda's most important park out of use for years, but it is inconceivable that it will ever return to its former pre-eminence, even with the addition of the current hospital lands. It will instead be a large hospital garden ? and there is no doubt that when the hospital administrators of the future decide on the need for expansion as they will, they will start nibbling away at the "new" park.

In addition, statements about how much one building will cost compared to another are essentially worthless, beyond acknowledging that building around the existing hospital will be more expensive than on the new site. Nor does the Botanical Gardens plan seem to account for the cost of relocating the extensive Ministry of Environment buildings which will be demolished or for the relocation of the display buildings now used for the Annual Exhibition.

In the absence of any public announcement about the number of storeys the hospital will be, its overall height or any kind of detailed drawings, no one knows how much it will end up costing and the $500 million figure given on Wednesday isn't worth the paper it is written on. The betting here is that it will be considerably higher.

The debate about the site will no doubt last a good deal of time. What can be said now is that the decision goes against the whole concept of sustainable development, which would suggest that using the existing "building" ? a brown field site ? admittedly at a higher cost, would be the hard but better choice.

A good deal will be said in the months to come that this a choice between parklands and health, and that it will be impossible to build the hospital at the current site. This is scaremongering. In the end this is all about price and time versus the need to preserve open space. Government has made its choice, and in doing so it has shown that the current sustainable development debate is nothing more than a farce.