City Council Concretes Streets for Christmas; How Can You Get Yours?

Darrell Bradley

The current Belize City Council administration has embarked on an ambitious program to upgrade Belize City streets. Results have held up for the most part, but concreting costs money and with most of its guaranteed funding locked up in the Municipal Bond, the Council is on the lookout for ways to partner with affected communities. Mayor Darrell Bradley tells us more.

Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor

“We have several major projects that are in the pipeline. A lot of people were complaining about the street in front of Publics that is being cemented right now. The project is quite extensive almost at Sun Street; so that East and West Canal will be resurfaced. Duck Lane, again, is part of that infrastructure improvement. We finished the entire length of St Joseph Street. We had significant concerns about Cinderella Plaza. Right now, we are targeting a section of Faber’s Road which is very, very dilapidated given the recent rains. We are also looking at other sections of major road networks including Raccoon Street because we are looking at the expansion of the concreting projects. We are still doing street infrastructure and improvement; it is not as obvious, of course, because we don’t have a municipal bond 20 million dollars, but it is still a significant amount of infrastructure going on. We are very shortly getting on the way with Ariel Rosado Street which is adjacent to Brodies on the northern highway. That is being done in partnership with members of the community who are putting together fifty percent of the funds to hot mix that street. So that right now we have about seven or eight street improvement projects going in Belize City. One of the things that we are evaluating as a City Council, we want to create a program whereby if you and your neighbours want to get together and you want to have your property taxes assigned to the improvement; and when I mean improvement, I mean the cementing or the hot mixing of your street. What we will do is that we will give you a credit on your property tax bill for a certain period. That is the same thing that we did when we did Moho Bay Street and when we did Daly Street. We had significant partnership from the members of the community.”