Over the past few weeks the Belize City Council has not been able to meet its bills, in particular those that pay some $580,000 monthly to the sanitation contracts to keep the city clean. That has meant that the contractors have had to cut down on what they pay to the workers and the spin effect has already begun with workers complaining that they've put in a fair share of work and they deserve to be compensated for it. While that's the bottom line, today Mayor Zenaida Moya conceded that her council simply cannot meet the payment to the contractors because they are cash strapped. She explains that monthly income from cruise ship passengers and central government subventions are no longer there and that means there is no money to pay.
Zenaida Moya, Belize City Mayor
"We normally receive this $100,000 to a $145,000 in head tax and that is what we used to use to pay the different sanitation and waste control companies. We no longer receive that. To add insult to injury, the government, the Ministry of Finance in particular, went ahead and paid off a loan to the Nova Scotia Bank without our approval, a $414,000 loan, and since then they have simply started to deduct via ten monthly deductions, from our subvention. So pretty much the council no longer receives around $200,000 monthly that it otherwise would receive.
So I must say that the government has really caused the council to not be able to pay these sanitation and waste control companies. We find ourselves not being able to pay the different sanitation companies and of course we fully understand that it is hundreds of workers we are talking about. Prior to not receiving it, we would always ensure that we paid it and we used to pay full the full amount to the sanitation companies.
But since then, we've been struggling and by them withholding in telling us we can no longer give us that amount from head tax, they will just take away a portion from our subvention and leave us hanging with over $9 million in debt, they have placed the residents of Belize City in a position whereby, I would say over four hundred sanitation workers we have, they have placed these workers in a position whereby, the over four hundred workers and their families, will no longer be able to see the amounts that should be in their pay checks.
We have come here to do our work on behalf of the residents but we're playing, we're dealing with people at the central government level that are not serious about the residents of Belize City and we make up a third of the population and I must say that a hungry man is an angry man.
And when we have these hundreds of sanitation workers, not being able to paid properly, I told the Prime Minister last night at a meeting we had when we had the welcome address at the Caribbean Public Service Association Conference, I told him a hungry man is an angry man and there is only so much that these people will take because turmoil will happen if we don't get what we are asking for, what the residents of Belize City deserve.
We know that we are already in negotiations with both SEL and BML to try to cut the value of the contracts in half. We cannot afford the contracts as it is. We definitely cannot afford it. We cannot have this void with these workers, these workers have to continue work and these are the people that we have to fight to ensure that they are okay and I will not jeopardize them. We are trying to do this thing smartly."
Moya added that they are still in the process of renegotiating the contracts and they are also implementing programs to train personnel that are in the employ of the sanitation contractors to fit them into other areas of employment. Meanwhile she says that the council's hands are tied as to seeking alternative means of financing since all approvals for that would have to be routed through the Ministry of Finance.
