Northside cleaning, maintenance privatized
Maybe you’ve seen them, weed whacker in hand diligently cutting back unsightly grass. Or maybe they are pushing a wheelbarrow or picking up trash. It’s all part of a new move by the Belize City Council to clean up the city by hiring a private contractor to tackle the entire northside.
The sanitation workers can easily be identified by their bright colored T-shirts and cleaning equipment in hand. These men and women are employees of Sanitation Enterprises Limited, a private company that has been given the contract to clean the city’s northside.
Elosia Trujeque, Councilor, Sanitation
“Well we decided to privatize this side of the program because it is much cheaper for us. We were paying like forty three thousand dollars a week and so this company came up and gave us a good offer of thirty one thousand dollars.”
Rupert Marin who has volunteered his services to the Belize City Council for many years, doing similar work, was awarded the contract on November fifteenth.
Rupert Marin, Manager, Sanitation Enterprises Limited
“Our service here is basically the service the City Council used to provide to the city. We have worked on a plan for two and a half years, putting some prices together, present it to the council on how we could probably improve the service by mechanizing most of the work that they used to do.
Presently we have a hundred and twenty seven people in different areas picking up the litter, the maintenance of the drains, certain drains, the cutting of the greenery around the parks, the street sides.”
Although the work was hired out to a private firm, Trujeque says the council will keep watch to ensure the northside is kept clean.
Elosia Trujeque
“We still monitor the program and in fact as Mr. Marin was about the begin the project he had a three-day workshop in which he invited our department, the Sanitation Department to participate in this workshop. Also he has meetings every week with his supervisors and then he will also give us a report. On the other hand we will send over one of our assistant supervisors to come and monitor at least once a week, to monitor the area to see if the work is being carried on.”
However, both Trujeque and Marin agreed that cleanliness is everybody’s business.
Elosisa Trujeque
“I want to encourage the residents to bag off their garbage properly because in that way they will be able to help us and try to keep their surroundings clean, the yards and so on.”
Rupert Marin
“Well we have a major problem right now with some of the stuff they would not want to see on TV that we are finding in bags on the streets. If people could just put the litter, their animals that die where we can reach it, it is both hidden or come by and call us and we will pick it up for them. But to go and throw it in the drains creates a major problem.”
The southside has not been privatized. Trujeque says the Belize City Council in association with Belize Waste Control is still responsible for that clean up. She says the council will now be able to better focus on the southside and improve that area’s infrastructure and drainage system.
