And another point of contention for City Hall is the sanitation contracts. We've reported quite a few times that they are often behind on payments, yet they must provide the city with the services they are bound to.
Today, we asked Mayor Bradley about this issue, and he said that the Council is unable to fix this situation anytime soon.
Darrell Bradley - Mayor of Belize City
"We will always have problems - I have repeatedly said that the two sanitation contracts costs us 45% of every single dollar that the City Council takes in goes to pays for those two contracts; that is unsustainable. I don't know that we are right now more than two weeks behind but on any given week we are always behind with them and that has been the situation before me and it will likely be the situation after me but the real question and difficulty here is that it is costing the Council too much - it is 45% of our outlays and there's not quick fix to this. We have to go back to court on the 17th of July - the attorneys of Waste Control sent us a proposal, I received it on Friday - I'm reviewing that then we will take advice from our legal advisors and we're going to respond to them either today or tomorrow and then we're trying to work out the situation with the judgment again. People are saying 'you're not paying them' but it's $2.4 million and I don't have - if I could have paid them I would have paid them. This is not a problem that I created - this was a problem from Mayor Zenaida, it was a problem from before her and it will likely be a problem after I leave office in 17 months."
Daniel Ortiz
"If the contracts are such a huge burden - the obvious question follows then - why doesn't the city just re-negotiate those contracts?"
Darrell Bradley
"We are trying - one of the things that we had indicated in the last round of negotiations was that we are trying to put everything on the table in regards to a renegotiation and ideally what we would want is to have the cost be less because it's too much and then what we would want is to pass on this cost and this is where we had the residential garbage fee because the Belize City Council's main responsibility of the Mayor is the City infrastructure - streets and drains, and that's what we're doing. We are focusing on the city as what our statutory mandate is - it says that we will regulate the collection of garbage it doesn't say that we are suppose to do that. But previous Councils saddled this burden on City Council so we are paying an inordinate amount of money just to clean the city and to pick up garbage. If residents would agree and this is something that could be done in consultation - if residents would agree to absorb that cost then we could ensure that we do all the streets in the city because then we would focus all our resources on infrastructure which is our primary mandate."
