And while the Deputy says everything is above board on a smooth-sailing ship, we did ask how the council-whose annual gross revenue is 33 million dollars-still has to fundraise with municipal paper:
Eluide Miller, Deputy Mayor of Belize City
"Well, I wouldn't want to approach it from that angle. In fact, I don't think the organic revenues of the council amount to 33 million. I think factored into our budget is also the assistance that we receive from the Government of Belize, in terms of infrastructure and that kind of thing, that is also factored in there as well. And so I don't think that our organic revenues really account for 33 million dollars. I don't think we're at that point as yet. But our municipal securities allow for others to invest in the city. As you can imagine, it's quite difficult for us to maintain and upgrade all the infrastructure that we have in the city out of operations, right? It's simply not very practical. We have over 700 streets in Belize City, for example, and over the past, I would say six to seven years alone, we have upgraded more than 300 of those streets. And so you could imagine how significant of a cost that is and how difficult that would have been to fund out of our operations alone. And so it's essentially a financial tool that we use in order to do some of the capital projects that we want to do. This time around, I think in our prospectus, we had quite a few things, including the expansion of our e-mobility fleet. And so we will be building that fleet, which is something that the residents of the city has been asking for us to do. In this specific offering as well is, of course, we are making allocations for additional infrastructural upgrades. I'm sure you have seen all the infrastructural upgrades we've been doing across the city. And also infrastructural upgrades that we plan on doing before the end of this term as well."
We note that the Government subvention to the council in 2025 was 5.9 million dollars.
