But one place you'll be happy burning that expensive gas is between miles 11 and 13 on the Philip Goldson Highway. That was one of the worst stretches of highway in Belize, riddled with potholes. But, now it's getting a hot mix treatment from Rodla Construction who signed a contract with the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Housing for just under two million dollars.
It's one of a series of scores of contracts totalling about 12 million dollars awarded by that Ministry under limited tender procedures. We asked the Prime Minister abut that practice of limited tendering:
Hon. John Briceno - Prime Minister
"And also what happened here is that the work was so extensive and spread across that it was impossible to just put it to tender and give it to one contractor. We have a lot of small contractors, some working on sugar roads say by San Estevan, others go by Blue Creek, others by 7 miles in Cayo. They were all over and so we had to get all of these small contractors and say guys let's do it. What is important though is that you can go out there and you can see the quality of work that was done for the amount of money. That was unprecedented. Even the highway that was in a deplorable state even before the rains and with the rains it got so much worse that I am told with hot mix that they are doing a mile for about $850,000. It is admirable what was done and I think it would be good if the public and the media would give credit where credit due. Is it a practice that we want to continue? Absolutely not. Are we where we want to be? Absolutely not, but you have to give us some time to be able to get where we want to be able to put everything in place so that we can be able to have the kind of transparency and accountability that would be necessary in government."
