CitCo Addresses Development of Fort George Tourism Zone

Darrell Bradley

On Thursday evening, a consultation was held at the Memorial Park in Belize City on the proposed development of the Fort George Tourism Zone. The master plan looks at specific changes in the area. One of the biggest concerns of residents was the flow of traffic that is proposed. During the consultations, a plan put together by the Belize City Council and the Belize Tourism Board was unveiled on how the zone will be organized and expected to function effectively. But residents were not receptive to some aspects of the plan. According to Mayor Darrell Bradley, substantial alterations will be done to incorporate some of the concerns raised about the zoning project.

Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor

“We want to make sure that while it is put together by technical persons, it has a significant input from the community so you would have seen the way that many times over the several weeks, we’ve done consultations with zoning, with taxes, with trade license reform. And the idea is that we want people to be aware of what the City Council is doing in terms of the planning and the decision making and we want citizen engagement to be a major focus. When we talk about planning and zoning, this alters people’s land use and it affects them in a very personal way because you are talking about their business and their homes. And we want them to be the directors of those policies—not that they will sit in all the meetings, but that the input is very important and that we go back to the drawing board if we recognize that there is a significant amount of concern in one particular decision. I can recall last night, a lot of people had very strong concern in terms of buses driving along particular streets. That’s something that we would have to revisit because of the response that we got. And we are certainly prepared to do that because again, citizen engagement must be a major focus on all our planning initiatives.”