It hasn't been officially announced yet but 7NEWS has confirmed that Cabinet has intervened decisively to end the head tax standoff. At today's Cabinet meeting, it was decided that the city council will get its one dollar from the cruise tourist head tax. The money will be comprised as follows: 33 cents from the Tourism Board, 33 cents from PACT and 33 cents from the Fort Street Tourism Village. But the money won't just be handed over; it will go into a fund to be administered by the Ministry of Local Government and disbursed on a monthly basis. With this offer, the memorandum of understanding between the City Council and the Belize Tourism Board is cancelled, as are the $374,000 in arrears.
So the bottom line is that City Hall will get its one dollar but is the Mayor satisfied enough to call off whatever disruptive action the council and the UDP had planned for next week? When word came down late this evening, we tracked down the Mayor and spoke with her. Here are her remarks, unedited.
Zenaida Moya, Mayor of Belize City
"Well first of all Keith I will need to see something in writing and see whether what all if any conditions are there that would go along with these monies and of course before any decision is made, if in fact those monies would be forthcoming, we would have to, as Belize City Council, meet with our party because it has now become a joint effort, in terms of lobbying. And so we will definitely have to meet jointly and discuss the situation, look at the legalities of it, and decide what course of action we would take."
Party Leader Dean Barrow said that he would wait to see the official offer before he comments. So the matter is near official resolution, and the man who would administer the fund is Minister of Local Government Jose Coye. Today he told us that accountability must be there before any money is handed over.
Hon. Jose Coye, Minister of Local Government
"And I will say this, yes as the Minister of Local Government that there is responsibility clearly on the part of the municipal government to justify the need for additional revenue and that is the discretion we want to have, once you costed your obligations under the City Council Act, and you have looked at your revenue base and you find it inadequate, that to me is a justification indeed to enhance the revenue and how it will be done. I think it must begin first the discussion as to what is the gap there is, if there is a gap, between the municipal government meeting its obligations from its existing revenue base, that is what we need to look at. And I think together, if we sit around the table, we should be able to discern whether there is a gap and, if there is, how much is the gap and how the gap can be funded."
Again, no official announcement has been made and the opposition's official response will be forthcoming only after that is made. The opposition had planned to disrupt cruise busses next week Tuesday most likely if a satisfactory resolution was not reached. That threat is still there, pending approval of this offer.
And while it's hardly consequential now - we note that the BTIA and the Business Bureau had issued releases urging city hall not to hold the cruise industry hostage while also urging government to intervene and come up with a solution.
