Belmopan Mayor to tackle running of city

While the UDP certainly didn’t get the outcome they were hoping for, the man who was elected as the first mayor of Belmopan certainly did. This morning Anthony Chanona told News Five he interprets the large number of split votes, the counting of which went on until early in the morning, as a sign that many Belmopanese want people who can get the job done, not just party faithfuls. He says job one for the new city council is to put the campaign behind them. The next step is to learn the administrative ropes.

Anthony Chanona, Mayor, Belmopan

“Well what we’re trying to do immediately–as of today–is to take down all the political propaganda that we worked very hard to put up during the campaign. We feel the people have spoken and the politics is over. So in Belmopan we have made a commitment, the People’s United Party, that all the blue and white paraphernalia and propaganda is coming down, that’s what we’re working at. In the medium term is to learn over the next thirty days how to run city hall. We tried to represent a team that was committed to managing the affairs city hall as a business, I think we sold that point. We did project the image that the infrastructure works would continue and that was a very important concern of residents. We have people in Belmopan and the surrounding communities for example that don’t have the basic necessities like water or light, electrification. And we have the commitment that these projects will continue. The bigger issue of job creation, this is the area which we want to draw. In our manifesto we made reference to the appointment of city commissioners, where we can draw on the vast resource we think is in Belmopan…that we know is in Belmopan. The retiree, the public service, ordinary citizens, to help us for example in designing specific strategies of creating jobs. So that we see as coming, as a third leg to our management “