Mayor Bradley Says CitCO Can Do It Better than BML…
Darrell Bradley
Belize City Mayor, Darrell Bradley, says the council’s debts to sanitation companies are perennial, but while he seems content with that explanation, the fact is that the Council is getting services and cannot pay for them. News Five is informed that where Belize Maintenance Limited is concerned, the Council owes close to eighteen weeks, more than a million dollars. Today we asked the Mayor about it, and he told us that sooner or later, the companies will be paid, and where BML is concerned, the Council can step in and do the job they do better, and cheaper.
Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor
“One of the things I’ll ask residents to appreciate is that this is forty percent of our inflows, forty percent of our revenues we spend on these two contractors; that’s significant for any municipality. And if you ask residents to look at the cleanliness of our city, for what we pay for, we don’t have a very clean city. So that what we are saying is that we are focusing on everything that we need to be focused on, but simply by virtue of the fact that these represent such significant outlays of our funding, it is going to be a burden at any given time of the year.”
Mike Rudon
“Since you mention the forty percent, there’s been an argument that it is much less than that. That your figures are skewed. That if you take the two contracts together and by four, by twelve, it comes out to a little less than thirty percent.”
Darrell Bradley
“That’s not the position. I would just do…I mean in relation to the overall budget, I dot have that. But I would ask anybody who is listening to just factor it. It is seventy-eight thousand dollars we pay just BML…seventy-eight thousand dollars per week times fifty-two; that’s something like four million fifty-six thousand dollars per year. I have these numbers memorized because I have to pay them. So that that…we pay four million fifty-six thousand dollars just for one contractor in a year. That is a significant amount of our outlays. The city council is only a seventeen million dollars a year organization in terms of our inflows. That represents a burden which I think most companies or most entities do not have to bear. And when you look at the value of what residents get, the value is not there. So what we are saying is that when this contract expires, we could substantially save in terms of that cash flow. Of course we are going to have to replace some of the service, but I use this point, if we pay—and I know they don’t have over a hundred staff—if we pay a hundred people two hundred dollars a week to clean Belize City; that’s only twenty thousand dollars. Twenty thousand dollars compared to the seventy-eight thousand dollars we pay currently. We can do it for far better, for far cheaper and we can invest in the diversity of programs that you alluded to: parks, streets, drains and the other things that are under the ambit of the municipality.”
