Mayor and taxi unions work out compromise

Following industry protests against the Belize City Council over parking fees for taxi drivers in the old capital, on Monday the unions, associations, and their attorney Michael Peyrefitte met with Mayor David Fonseca in an attempt to reach a compromise. According to the City Council, the implementation of fees for the preferential parking spots had been in the works for two years and was imposed as a trade license fee for taxi drivers. But the drivers immediately started to bawl that the rates were too high, and after days of back and forth in the media, this afternoon Mayor Fonseca informed News Five that a middle ground had been reached.

David Fonseca, Belize City Mayor
?It was agreed that one, that the fee is being charged per parking spot. So if you have twelve parking spots, that?s the fee you are going to pay, the fee times that amount of parking spots. The other issue was the amount of the fee. We had levied a fifty dollars per parking spot, per month. We have agreed yesterday that we would move that from fifty to thirty dollars a month, which works out to a dollar a day.?

Janelle Chanona
?Where will the money collected from the taxi associations go into, which fund??

David Fonseca, Belize City Mayor
It?s going to come to the council, the municipalities fund and that fund will be used specifically to pay for the cost of traffic management and to pay for the upkeep of these particular spots. We have to keep repainting the parking areas, we have to keep in some cases resurfacing the areas, and maintaining the place clean on a daily basis. So that?s where the fee will go, and even the fee that is being paid will not cover that cost.?

The date for the implementation of the parking fees has also been pushed back to August first. According to the Mayor, another meeting will be announced by the end of this week at which the City Council and representatives of the taxi unions and associations will establish a rate structure for cab rides in the city. It is also understood that following Monday’s meeting, the City Council will conduct a second technical exercise to determine the number of spots at each taxi stand and the number of persons listed as members in the respective associations.