And the Briceno administration is also working feverishly on the budget for the next fiscal year - which starts on April first. The PM said some ministries have still not sent in their respective budgets, but they decided as a Cabinet that there are areas that warrant more priority.
We also asked him about the criticism that he had when he was in opposition about the government copying and pasting budgets, and if he's guilty of doing the same.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"We are not a matter of copy and pasting, we have to work with what we have. The beginning of this financial year, we made certain assumptions and so we had to tighten the budget but as time went by, t he revenues were increasing considerably so we had extra money to do some of the things that we had to do like with the hurricane, etc, so that's what we did this year but in the coming year I've been telling ministers that we have to be very strategic in our deiciosn making and to ensure that we look at what are the priorities in this new coming year, that is why in the retreat for the Cabinet and parliamentarians, we looked at what we were doing, we looked at Plan Belize, we looked at what we had that we promised, and we tried to come up with some priorities for this year and we hope that that could be reflected in the budget. We have been working, the Ministry of Finance, the Financial Secretary, Minister Coye and myself, we have been working constantly with the different ministries, I know some of them have not been responding as quickly as we wanted them to but I sent out a notice on Friday urging all ministers to speak with their CEO's and their technical people to ensure that they can send the necessary information that they have. When I was in opposition, I was not criticizing the increasing expenditure, I was criticizing that there was no real economic plan and that the government was just spending money for spending. Now we have a plan, we have presented it today to you, our medium term strategy, and it is based on Plan Belize and it is those strategic objectives, now we look at how we can take out from there and put it so that it can be reflected in the budget as the work that we want to accomplish this year."
