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One man who should have some expertise is the Minister of Infrastructure Development and Housing. Julius Espat is a certified architect and his constituency of Cayo South is also right across the road from the proposed location.
He today said it's a choose between where the developers want to spend 6.9 million - plus the time it would take to civilize the UB area:
Julius Espat, Minister of Infrastructure Dev. & Housing
"Every option has positives and negatives, that's just how it is. I'm an architect so when we build we look at all options. UB could have been a good option with time, we haven't looked at it from our Ministry in detail but it would have meant that you would have to spend $6 million or more in infrastructure to reach the hospital. That could be good because other people would benefit from the infrastructure going in so that's a positive thing. But the expediency of having the hospital being built, we would have take maybe 2 or 3 years to get that project underway so I think speaking with the Saudis, they wanted it now, and so that's where the option came about. Is it in the flood prone zone? I think the deputy said it well, Belize is in a flood prone zone, and if you have it there and the road floods you won't have the ability to take your patients to Belize City, well, if you have it in Belmopan and you have a flood, the same thing will happen because it's on the main highway. We know of the flooding areas and we have started to address it, I think PlusTV knows it more than the other media, they are in Belmopan, they saw that we are working on the J&W Bridge already which is the first phase of making that are have free flow of water so that bridge is about, I'd say, about 75% completed and then we have a project called the George Price rehabilitation project which is on the Ministry of Finance's desk and that one incorporates bridges in the Mount Pleasant area which would also alleviate that area. So with time, we will address all those issues. We recently addressed the one in Roaring Creek where after the road was built we noticed that there was a flooding where you couldn't cross the Roaring Creek Bridge, we have already addressed part of it already. So all proposals have their pros and con and we have to look at it in detail and the job of the media is to dissect it and bring out the truth and I think that is what has been achieved and I think that's positive."
We'll continue to dissect this one. Plus, we'll have more on that J and W area he discussed later on in the news.
