Darrell Bradley’s Sanitation Woes

Darrell Bradley

In mid-January 2015, a contract issued to Belize Maintenance Limited will expire, and one hundred and seventy workers from that company will be hired on by the Belize City Council. Or will they? That’s the million dollar question right now. Prime Minister Barrow has said yes, and Mayor Darrell Bradley has said no. Since the commitment was made by PM Barrow months ago, Mayor Bradley has continuously indicated that he’s not keen on the idea. But today, for the first time, he spoke openly, frankly and in length on the matter which has reportedly put him on the Prime Minister’s black list this Christmas.

Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor

“I think that it is a bad idea for the city to grow its staff by thirty-five percent. That’s notwithstanding the fact that something needs to be done with the people. I understand the humanitarian aspect of it, and I think that we could deal with that in a different way, a better way. Having said that, I do not think that the City Council needs to grow its staff by so much. We have certain difficulties at the City Council. I think that the city has moved forward in the two and a half years since I have been Mayor, and one of the things we need to do at this point is to consolidate the gains that we’ve made and work on our weaknesses. In the last month we lost ten weed whackers, we lost our projector…we lost a generator…in this month all of those things were stolen from the City Council, these are significant amounts of public funds, and we have yet to prosecute anyone for this, we have yet to see that our management structure is in place so that we can prevent against loss of property and now what we are doing is that we’re going out and we’re ballooning the City Council with significant more issues, and that’s not a direction that I think we ought to take, and I’m the Mayor. Now, when we are trying to control the budget, we have a situation where we have to deal with one hundred and seventy more people. That’s thirty-five percent more staff and that’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to any budget and it’s difficult to see that working properly. And I have to account to members of the public in terms of my stewardship of City Hall.”