Memorial Park to Be Opened…AGAIN
More than one year ago, the Government of Belize proudly opened the newly upgraded, spiffy Memorial Park in Belize City. It boasted modern booths for vendors, in an architectural style which we were assured was innovative and visionary, as well as a stylish bandstand. It was allegedly done at a cost of over three million dollars, and the opening featured speeches and the usual pomp and ceremony. That was a year ago, and the doors of those booths never opened, not once. The multi-million dollar visionary park was just left there – used rarely for the odd event a couple times a year. Well all that’s going to change now. According to Mayor Darrell Bradley, the park has been handed over to the City Council and is set to be opened, again, by December.
Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor
Darrell Bradley
“Now that this has been passed over to the City with a launch date of December; I think just before Christmas we are launching Memorial Park. And we are working an anchor tenant, Fuego’s from out of Cayo, they do very good work and they have signed on to eight of the booths. We are also working with the hair braiders; they are going to take a couple of the booths also. And we are working with other small vendors. So out strategy has been to get an anchor tenant, who is Fuego’s and then to have all of the remaining booths taken up by small business persons who are in the area. All the contracts, the training, the grant facilities and all of those things are being underway and we are going to open Memorial Park by the twentieth of December. I want to make a point here though that when we do a project, we did B.T.L., we appreciate that the park is not an infrastructure project. There is an infrastructure component, but the biggest part of it is human relations. So Memorial Park, for example, one of the things that I raised is that the initial approach was that it was an infrastructural project. So now we are trying to bring on board the human relations component. It would have been more effective if while the infrastructure was going on—which is what we did at B.T.L. Park—we had the training, we had the vendors who were participating in the design. So as soon as the park is finished, everybody moves back in there. Now what we have done, because we separated the project, is that we are trying to get together that most important human resource component and we are getting it right now. We have Fuego’s and we have the small vendors on board and it is just to ensure that the retrofitting is okay; that they are satisfied with when they go out there, everything will be a huge success. We are also working with some entertainers who will be performing every single day, particularly for cruise ship tourists; so that we can ensure that there is life to the park. That is going to be a day time activity and then we are going to focus on B.T.L. Park as being the night time activity.”
All this kind of makes you wonder just how much real thought goes into these million dollar projects which ultimately are paid for by the taxpayers of Belize.
