A Hundred-day Report Card for P.U.P. CitCo

Oscar Arnold

Mayor Bernard Wagner and his P.U.P, this week marked their first hundred days at City Hall. After a decade of U.D.P. rule, the first order of business was a look at the state of finances as well as the contracts, programmes and other systems left behind by the previous council. Today, they called the media to report on the delivery of commitments they made during the campaign. The Deputy Mayor, Oscar Arnold, spoke of establishing the guidelines for a municipal public accounts committee to ensure the proper management of funds at city hall as well as a promise to persons affected by gang violence. In terms of road works, he referred to the fix of manholes that have become a hazard to residents. 

Oscar Arnold, Deputy Mayor, Belize City

“A part of it has been some restructuring to move human resources in areas where they can better compliment what we are trying to accomplish. As Mayor Wagner has put it, he doesn’t want to be only tied to a hundred days and then the next hundred days. The mandate has been for almost over a thousand days, for three years, and some of the promises, some of the pledges that we had in our manifesto pretty much goes for that entire time. But for some of the measurements, we have done rehabilitative work, repair work on about over sixty streets. A big problem that we met when we came in and wasn’t a part of the plan was the manhole covers that were missing on many streets and people were getting injured by them—people with diverse abilities, mothers walking home with their children; that sort of stuff. So we have been able to replace over two hundred of those and we enact a study to be done as to how many still outstanding and we have a little over twelve hundred and so we are giving priority to areas around schools and then main arteries—Albert Street, Orange Street, Freetown and then the side streets that feed into these main arteries. We’ve also had our social infrastructure that we look at’ we’ve had the grief therapy that is ready to be kicked off. Major work was also done on the Municipal Public Accounts Committee, but the literature and everything has been put together for that. Mayor again will have to go over that at a council caucus because we will then have to approach Ministry of Local Government just to have them know that we want to enact that as a policy first before, because if it becomes law, then it pretty much covers all the municipalities.”