Mayor Bradley Explains BML Debt Woes…
Darrell Bradley
On Friday, employees of Belize Maintenance Limited were up in arms over City Hall’s mounting debt with the sanitation company. BML had been contracted by a previous city council administration to clean streets and drains across the Old Capital at a cost of almost eighty thousand dollars weekly. Shouldering the hefty sum has always been a burden for successive administrations and the house that Mayor Bradley runs is no different. While the existing agreement will not be renewed come January 2015, CitCo admits that it has fallen into arrears with the company. According to Mayor Bradley, the issue is recurrent and had been foreseen since December of last year when the council was doubling up on payments owed to another, more litigious sanitation company.
Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor
“I had indicated that it’s an annual thing that always happens and when we come middle of the year we will grow again in our debt and this is exactly what is happening. The reality is that the problem is not our ability to pay, the problem is really just the size of the outlays. We pay BML seventy-eight thousand dollars per week. We pay [Belize] Waste Control fifty-one thousand dollars per week, above salaries, above streets, above everything that’s our biggest outlay and I am asking residents to just analyze this: the amount of money you pay for sanitation, you do not have a clean city. So that that is something that doesn’t affect the city, that is something that should affect all of us. It’s something that all of us should be concerned about and we are thankful that come January, at least in relation to BML, we won’t have to deal, and that’s the bigger of the two contracts, we won’t have to deal with that particular contract and we think that we could do it far cheaper and we think that we could give the residents of Belize City a much cleaner city and that’s the strategy that we’ve put in place. Notwithstanding all of that, we have made overtures to communicate with BML, we have indicated to them that whatever the city owes you we will pay you and that has been the position with [Belize] Waste Control. We have been a very responsible city overall in terms of our debt.”
