It’s been long overdue and business owners and residents living along Blue Marlin Boulevard including motorists and pedestrians will no longer have to put with dust, potholes and even flood water that have plagued this neighborhood for quite sometime. After two weeks of preparation today Blue Marlin Boulevard drive was finally paved. Deputy Mayor and the Councillor in charge of streets and drains Anthony Michael witnessed the final phase of the work but as he explained there is still much more to be done.
Anthony Michael, Deputy Mayor
“Blue Marlin Boulevard, if you could recall, was in a very very bad condition. I think that is putting it mildly. The street, according to our engineers, had to be elevated at least six inches in order to avoid flooding. If a category three or four hurricane comes naturally it would flood, the entire city would flood. But for normal rain and stuff Blue Marlin should not flood after this.
We are putting in some culverts along West Landivar because this drain out to the sea front from that direction so we are reshaping the drain and stuff and we elevated it. We are at the process now where tar is ready to be put on Blue Marlin Boulevard.
We had forecasted just to do Blue Marlin for this week and when we looked at Teacher’s Street it was also in very very bad condition. So we decided to have procured more hardcore material, we put on Teacher’s Street, we are now compacting it and we are putting in some culvert on Teacher’s Street which is very very necessary. That alone was very very low. In normal high tide Teacher’s Street used to flood so we also elevated that another four inches or so and with proper drainage going out to the canal that’s right behind Saint John’s College, we should not have that problem anymore.
Some time in the next week and a half to two weeks we will be paving Logwood Street which is right by La Popular Bakery, a lot of people use that.
We’ve been asked the question several times, how do you guys determine which street to pave and naturally we go around and try to look at the more traffickable streets and we do not want to have ant division or anybody left out so we are trying to pave a major street within each division and the most trafficked streets besides Albert, Regent, and Central American Boulevard which we’ve been given the assistance by the Ministry of Works with that hot mix. I think within the next month or two the residents of Belize City will be totally satisfied seeing that their tax money is actually being put to use.
There is no bloated contract Jackie. I think this has been the cry of the Belizean public for many many years. If you all have the expertise in house, if you all have the equipment and now with a friendly central government all we are buying is the material. We are doing the trucking ourselves with assistance from our Ministry of Works. The only thing that we have issued out because we do not have it available is a tar truck and that is the only thing we do but all the other work is being done by the Belize City Council out here with some of the equipment being loaned to us by the Ministry of Works, value for money.”
The project is estimated to cost about sixty five thousand dollars.
