Water Rates shoot up like geyser
Just a week after Prime Minister Dean Barrow painted a grim picture about the economic prospects for the new fiscal year, the Public Utilities Commission made that picture even bleaker when today it announced that water rates will go up. In a press release today from the P.U.C., it announced that it approves a twelve point one percent rate increase. The Belize Water Services had applied for a twenty five percent rate increase late last year and in February of this year an independent expert, Dr. Richard Hern recommended a seventeen percent increase. The PUC will hold a news conference at its office on Tuesday morning at ten to explain how it arrived at the twelve percent approved increase.
This government and these utility companies seems to think we poor belizeans have money trees grwoing in our backyards. All the utilities seems to be cooking the books when it comes to their accounting practices. Not because they say this and they say that means we have to jump everytime they cry and say they are not making any profits and they need to raise rates. Dah fool di talk but dah no fool di listen. Whats stopping a big company like BEL, WASA, and BTL from cooking the books and lying to the government about how much profit is being made, or how much investment they are doing or how much money they are loosing or their expendature in general? They present to the government and public only what they want us to see and know or at lease what they want us to believe since they take us for fools anyways.
It is amazing that the rates for basic human needs are increasing. There has and will not be any time soon an increase in the salaries. How can the Belizean people sustaint eh raising cost of living? Water and Power are not luxury items.
i like how the increase come at the benefit of profits and never at the benefit of the nation…..these people have a hard punishment coming
We should place all the members of the PUC on a $200 no thats too much better yet on $100 per week which is about all we get right now after we done pay off our bills if we are lucky. Put them on that salary for 6 months to see if we deserve yet another increase in the sad year 2010. All the members of the PUC are rich and have no idea what it is to budjet up to the last cent week by week. They are the bunch of people least qualified to say if we do or do not deserve to pay more for water. But i bet all the members of the PUC are close friends with the owners of the water company…hmmm.. i wonder why…
Come on, we all know how corrupt it is in Belize, money speaks all languages. Belizeans are are way too cheap, easily bought and sold for a couple blue notes in their hands. For sure the people in the PUC are being bought out and paid off big money by the utilities to have things go in their favour. Don’t think for a second that the PUC is here to watchout for us and our pockets. We all know who the PUC is out to protect, the utilities not the customers. The PUC can’t do a damn thing for me but increase my utility expensies plain and simple. You always hear that the PUC is increasing rates but you never hear anything about the rates decreasing. Why? And it’s the same thing with government ministers. If BWS wants an increase, then government should increase taxes on them…they are getting water at no cost to them anyways it’s not like they are making the water somewhere or buying it from someone and selling it to us. Yes they have to transport it and purifyit , pay expensies, etc but but if thats whats causing them to loose money on a product they are selling that they don’t have to pay for initially, then something must be wrong. Trust me when i say, ALL the utilities are cooking their books…don’t believe a word they say or the documents they present to government saying how much profits made, investments made, expensies they encured over any period of time. What’s stopping them from lying about that information??… Its a big conspiracy.