Mayor vows to pay Waste Control debt

Darrell Bradley

Two weeks ago Belize City Mayor Darrell Bradley dodged contempt charges when the Belize City Council and Belize Waste Control managed to reach a compromise. The issue on the legal table was a longtime debt owed to B.W.C. which, with interest accrued, amounted to almost two point four million dollars. In the end both parties had to make significant financial goodwill gestures, but in this story, all’s well that ends well. Mayor Bradley is confident that by the end of this year the debt to B.W.C. will be fully paid off.

Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor

“I think that we were able to impress upon them the financial position of the City Council. It is a substantial amount. There is no account that we have that money in. And at the end of the day we want to ensure that we are meeting our financial obligations, we’re paying our debtors including and especially court claims which, if we don’t pay those then of course you can see that there’d be contempt proceedings so what we did is that we knocked heads for a period of several months and we outlined a framework going forward and that framework resulted in them writing off one million dollars worth of the judgment and that brings the judgment to around one point two million dollars and that is an amount which the City Council can pay. We have already paid half of that amount of money. We paid it through our attorneys, Young’s law Firm. We sent the check last week. We’re battening down the hatches to be able to raise the remaining one half and we will pay that before the ending of the year. They wanted us to do better which we must do better on the arrears situation. They wanted us to do better in relation to coordination in terms of things like hot spots and other areas, the working of commercial garbage which is something that we should have done already so that this committee would address those issues and we have a little time and we have put in place benchmarks so that we will report back to their head and to myself the committee will so that we could move forward in a spirit of cooperation, in a way that ensures the benefit of the residents of the city. But on our part the getting of a one million dollar write off is a significant benefit to us and it enabled us to deal with them in a way that I think is fair for all parties concerned and so that’s the current status of that and I expect that at the end of the year we will have fully paid off what we owe them in relation to that judgment.”