3 weeks ago, 7News told you about the decision by the Belize City Council to close off the section of the street between Mule Park and Belize Bank.
This is a major re-route for many motorists coming off Orange Street who intend to make their way over the Swing Bridge.
Mayor Darrell Bradley explained that this was deliberate because his council is trying to generate activity on the southern end of Albert Street. His reason is that this will generate a lot of commercial interest in that area, and as a result, they were testing to see how the residents would react.
He's received quite a bit of negative criticism for this decision, and today, we asked him if that has changed his opinion on whether or not it should be permanently closed.
He told us that all indications are that it is working exactly as intended:
Darrel Bradley - Mayor of Belize City
"I had indicated that we were doing that we were doing a test as you see no work has been done to that section as yet and our indication and analysis has shown that this is working so we will move ahead with the plan. I wanted to emphasize and indicate here that it's not my decision to interrupt that area - this is one of the projects for the master plan for Belize City and when I became Mayor in March of last year, one month after the City Council passed a resolution that we embrace the master plan. So this is not a surprise and it's not something that we got up one day and said that we wanted to terrorize people by closing off the street - that major artery. This is party of a plan that has been developed over three years and widespread consultation was done and as Mayor we are implementing that plan. If we interrupt that section that we are interrupting - we are actually forcing traffic to go more down the southern part of Albert Street. You're going to lift the commercial character of that area and you will also encourage a situation that there will be less crime because there will be more traffic. So all of this is part of our plan - we are monitoring the traffic situation very closely so that we ensure that it continues to work and people don't continue to experience frustrations. Just because people criticize something doesn't mean it's sufficient reason for you to scrap the plan. One of the reasons we halted it is because we recognize that there had been problems and we put our people out there and we monitored it so as a result of public criticism we responded. We stopped the work and we said let's test this thing for a week and it's working so nothing suggests that we should delay the plan. The plan wouldn't have been done if it didn't make sense and we're constantly developing it and revising it to see that it's actually workable but nothing from what is going on the ground right now is saying that we should stop, the traffic is actually flowing and it's going about in the area that we designed."
