And the Transport CEO also gave us an update on where they are with the $3.00/per gallon fuel subsidy for bus owners:
Chester Williams, CEO, Ministry of Transport
"Currently we are in motion, we have discussed the matter with the president of the BBA trying to finalize how how the submission is going to look like. We have come to that agreement, we have received the first submissions from the bus operators and so it's just a matter of the team that we assemble at the ministry to go through the verification process. Once that is done then we will disburse money to the operators. So it's going well, we are grateful to the operators for their patience because they were supposed to receive their first payment this week but that did not occur because we were still working on the submissions so next week they should receive their first payment for this week and next week."
"They submit by 4pm on Monday and we pay by Wednesday/Thursday of the same week so It gives the team at the ministry the time to be able to do the investigation and verify that the submissions are accurate."
"Six months in the first instance to deal with bringing all the different cultures together, the different employees from different companies plus the fact that you have people working at the terminals that are government employees so we gave ourselves six months to work through that. In terms of the electric buses coming on stream, we gave ourselves until the end of next year 2027 for those buses to be fully replacing the fleet that we have now and then the terminals will be probably another year to two years before we can put new terminals in place for example a new one in Belize City, a terminal in Orange Walk, they don't have one in Orange Walk as yet, proper terminal in San Ignacio and Benque and in Punta Gorda as well."
