CitCo Assimilates Former BML Workers

Darrell Bradley

Since the cancellation of a burdensome sanitation contract with Belize Maintenance Limited a few weeks ago, City Hall has assumed the salaries of a hundred and forty-seven workers.  Those men and women are responsible for cleaning streets and drains across the city and were at the center of a tumultuous situation with the Belize City Council in 2014 when City Hall fell short of its debt obligation with BML.  Since Prime Minister Barrow essentially instructed Mayor Bradley to take them on, the transition has been ongoing.  Today, Mayor Bradley gave an update on their assimilation and the financial impact it is having on city hall’s wage bill.

Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor

“It’s been going very well.  I have been very much on the ground monitoring that situation, meeting with our director of finance and the city administrator on a regular basis to ensure that the transition is going well.  I have been coordinating very closely with counselor Dion Leslie who is the counselor with responsibility for sanitation.  He has indicated to me that some equipment that the central government has gifted us to the tune of one million dollars has landed in the country as well.  That includes dump trucks, buses, backhoes, a lot of other equipment in terms of ensuring that the sanitation transition works smoothly.  We are ensuring that they are on the ground daily so that we have work crews now cleaning out drains and I have been out there inspecting that these things are actually going on.  We are sweeping streets which we never did before, we are ensuring that a lot of the canals are cleared out so we are trying to ensure that this transition works well and the residents of Belize City can get better for the money that we spend on sanitation.  It’s still expensive, one of the things that we have been monitoring very closely is that our wage bill has gone from one hundred and eighty thousand to three hundred and twenty thousand [dollars] so that we’re talking about an additional only one hundred and forty-seven people came onboard.  We offered employment to a hundred and fifty-eight but only one forty-seven actually took the job and that represents a significant increase in terms of our wage bill but on the ground everything is working very well.”