And while the minister was in the Belize Rural North constituency, there seemed to have been an issue brewing in Biscayne. According to reports, under the previous administration, the village chairman village identified and surveyed lots within the village to distribute to residents. However, he claimed that the government wanted to use those plots to give to members of the BNTU instead - thereby trumping his autonomy.
Today, the minister clarified the situation.
Hon. Cordel Hyde, Minister of Natural Resources
"The chairman is jumping the gun, I didn't speak to the chairman myself but he spoke to my assistant Paul and a couple of our officers and what we've undertaken to do is all the applications that he sent, we will process those. We are not going to process them here because there's hundreds of people here, but we will process those in a special little operation for him actually, there's no need for him to jump the gun, we are not unfair people. If things started before us, we will try our best to process them, but the demands are great for this ministry. I can tell you in the case of Independence, I can't even tell you the pronunciation of the area in Independence, thousands of lots involved, lots of people paid for those lots long before, and so when we went to have a clinic there in December of last year, we process those. We didn't give people who bought ten lots, ten lots because we are about focusing on people who don't have land, first time land owners and the problem with these programs and these kinds of projects in these villages is that it ends up focusing primarily on people who can afford to pay for the survey. So someone who has five lots, they can pay for five lots, it can't be like that. In that case the people who don't have will never be able to get so we try to rationalise it that way and that's exactly how we'll deal with it with this project."
