BML to Receive Payment From City Hall for Five Weeks of Arrears

Lawrence Ellis

It’s been a couple weeks since the clash between the workers of Belize Maintenance Limited and the Belize City Council. Things came to a head after City Hall went into arrears for nineteen weeks, which amounts to about one point five million dollars. The company couldn’t continue to pay the workers, and the workers demonstrated their discontent by strewing garbage in front of City Hall. All’s well that ends well, and after a little jail time, five hundred dollar tickets and a couple days outside the courts, an agreement was worked out. So where does that stand now? Well the first payment from City Hall, for five weeks arrears, should be in BML’s hands by next week Friday. Today BML owner Lawrence Ellis told us more.

Lawrence Ellis, Owner, Belize Maintenance Limited

“On the fifteenth of August the Mayor officially wrote the Council’s proposal to liquidate the arrears by January 2015 to come current. The proposal is fair enough. We accepted it. We wrote back accepting it. Presently the Mayor is out of the country but we spoke by email. The attorney and he spoke by email this morning and he has confirmed that he will have somebody at the City Hall deal with it until he returns, but we accepted the proposal. The workers are back at work and they are being paid, so they are okay. When the company is really facing financial difficulties it never trickles down to the workers unless it affects salaries, then that’s when they really would get involved. So as far as the mood of the workers, they are okay. We have a little situation right now with some things that we need to buy that we can’t afford to buy, and I don’t want to invest in it until the Mayor comes up with his portion, to make sure that he does what he says he is going to do. We need to repair some equipment, we have all those weed-whackers needing parts, we need to get parts for those, but right now we have to hold off until the Mayor makes his first commitment.”

Ellis says his attorney is already making provision for a course of action if the Council were to default on even the first payment.