Yesterday you heard what the PM had to say about the contract awarded to Lawrence Ellis, the PUP candidate who lost in the 2025 general elections. But now, his company, Reliable Waste Solutions, will be getting $33,000 a week to cut grass around the city. And you might be thinking - isn't that the city council's job?
Well, according to the mayor it's a job that they've been struggling with. He explained that it's been difficult hiring more people to cut the grass and with over 700 streets, they had to try and find other solutions.
Here's what he told us.
Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City
"Unfortunately for us, we only have essentially 14 grass cutters for the entire city, 736 streets, and along with that, 14 grass cutters we have a complement of like 16 rakers, people who rake and back so it's a challenge for us to be able to manage 730+ streets in the city."
"In 2022 we did a call and I believe at that time the previous CA was alive and we did a call to hire like 50 grass cutters and I have the Amandala newspaper here to show that we sent out these. We sent it out, we published it, we asked for grass cutters, we only got I believe like 2 applications came in. So that didn't work so we went to a constituency sort of solution, we looked at how we could integrate the area reps in finding the people within their own communities to assist us and then we would foot the bill."
"We found a lot of challenges with that, we get substandard work, the constituency groups essentially just chop off the top of the grass and we weren't getting the sort of results we needed."
"What we are looking at that we were paying on a monthly basis $15,000 per division. That worked out to $180,000 a month."
"And so in April of this year, we had a need, Mr Ellis brought a solution to the council which really entailed that he would do the grass cutting and I had the letter here dated 10th of April, his proposal to us, we brought it to the council and the council deliberated in the month of September and the council approved the proposal as is."
"With the solution from Reliable Waste Solution, Larry Ellis, it puts us at approximately $140,000 per month which works out to $1.6 million, saving the council a little bit close to half a million dollars which we would have spent in having the constituency help us."
We also asked the mayor whether Ellis had originally asked for a ten year contract, and why the contract wasn't put out for a public bid.
Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City
"He was requesting essentially ten years and I understand the business of starting up a business, you want to go to the bank, in these types of businesses and especially working with the council, you require some measure of overdraft, working capital so to speak and if you are going to a bank and asking for an overdraft to invest in capital, machinery, equipment, the bank would want some measure of reassurance and I think a 5 year contract in my view is pretty adequate even though the individual may have requested ten, we feel more comfortable at the level of 5 and then we assess based on performance after that period and then we go from there."
Courtney Menzies:
"Why wasn't it put out to a public bid?"
Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City
"Well, we had a need and it was a bid but it was done in a selected way where we looked at Mr Ellis, he had vast knowledge of doing this work before. I do believe prior to myself being elected he had a similar sort of contract but that contract I believe was at $78,000 so we have been able to really reduce that, I know that $78,000 included a lot more other services but at this point in time we are only looking at the pruning, the parks, the playgrounds, the medians, the streets, drains all across the city. Actually he has really put the city in a 14 grid sort of system here which really divides the city into various grids as you can see. I believe he has the expertise, having done this before and so on the basis of that our council members felt comfortable to approve this proposal."
