And so, there will be a lot more testing done - the residents of San Pedro - braved COVID exposure to getting their land situation fixed up.
The Ministry of Natural Resources had their mobile land clinic in the town today where they assist residents, especially first timers, on getting land titles. Minister Cordel Hyde said the process is not easy, and many tears were shed, but the ministry will continue this endeavour as long as they are in office.
Hon. Cordel Hyde - Deputy Prime Minister
"It's been long overdue; we were supposed to come out here from months ago to a mobile land clinic. In the case of San Pedro it has been in high demand, they have been calling us over and over but we're finally here for two days, today and tomorrow to provide land services to the people of San Pedro, we brought the entire department here, everything, you can get your lease here, you can get your purchase approval here, you can get your permission to survey here, you can get your title, you can pay for your purchase approval, the full department is here today serving the good community of San Pedro. Some difficult cases, we had a case, a lady was brought here and she came to apply for land she had lived there for many years, she hasn't been able to get to get any papers for the longest and then we approve it, we recommended her, she finally goes and when she gets there she finds out someone else has title for her land, she's in tears, we have a number of those cases that's popped up today where people actually live on their land, living there for many years only to find out that just recently someone got title to the land, really sad and difficult cases but we'll try to do everything we can in the department to remedy that. It's not so easy and good sense and decency and good heart will have to prevail here but we will have to reach out to those people who have title, who's gotten their title recently and try to work it out, to try to make it such that two persons who live there for the longest and who has been trying for the longest to get papers and not been able to get it, to see how we can help them. We're going to presume that those people who got title recently got title assuming that it was land that was vacant and in that case we can try to work out sometime that pleases everyone but in some cases you may find those persons who may recently got the title want to be malicious and want to drive a hard bargain and then that's a different matter. The mobile clinic started maybe 15 years ago, the good thing is we're going to do this for 5 years, we're going to do this not just for elections but repeatedly and that way taking the department to the people I think would help somewhat with the long lines that you find at Belmopan but it's also about streamlining what we do in September, we're going to get a streamlined version of landfolio which is going to make the land application process much easier, will make us able to provide leases and permission to survey and purchase approvals in the shortest possible time, but that's us mowing down a tremendous backlog that we had. What happened in the last administration is that for 6 years or more, we just decided we are not going to do any inspection at all and so a tremendous backlog built and you can't humanly do them, you can't possibly go to all these thousand of locations to see what's there, so we just gotten this past week updated satellite imagery that will show us in real time what's on the lands and that will allow us to speed up the inspection process and so once we get that done, hopefully by September, October things are going to flow a whole lot easier."
