Belize City Council launches clean-up campaign

Belize City is often criticized as being a dirty place, so today the Belize City Council embarked on a clean up campaign that they intend to maintain on a long term basis. The work began in Caribbean Shores this morning as maintenance crews were clearing drains, removing trash and mowing grass. According to Councillor responsible for sanitation and public health, Wayne Usher, while the work is part of the sanitation companies contract, the council feels they need to help out.

Wayne Usher, Councillor, Sanitation, Public Health
“We are gonna clean almost every street here. We are gonna to arrange for the drains to be dug, if you notice we’ve already dug some here. We need to pick up just afterwards. Our men are in the background working and we’ll do this for this constituency. Once we’ve cleared this out then we move to another constituency. Matter of fact, it’s a community between the community and the Belize City Council.”

Marion Ali
“But this is something that you’ve been doing as a City Council right, cleaning the streets, digging drains?”

Wayne Usher
“But not at this level, not concentrated like this. We are doing this apart from the other two contractors, you know. We have Belize Maintenance Limited who are contracted to clean the streets etcetera and Belize Waste Control is contracted to take out the garbage. We are doing this in between, if you may, to re-emphasise and make sure that the job is well done.”

Zenaida Moya, Belize City Mayor
“We recently met with both the Chinese and the Indian communities whereby we asked them to come onboard with the sanitation provider, Belize Waste Control. To a large extent, a lot of the hot spots that we see around the city, a number of them are contributed to the fact that the different store keepers and business owners in some instances are not signed on to a relationship with the Belize Waste Control so they do not have an established contract between both entities and that has been causing some problem. We know that it is an additional cost to businesses to dispose of their garbage but it’s something that has to be included into their whole overhead expenditures simply because it’s causing problems to the City.”

Marion Ali
“Will that have any bearing on the present contracts that you have with the companies?”

Wayne Usher
“We are renegotiating with them as we speak to make sure that we get value for money where they are concerned, but this is the little extra that this city council is putting in to bring it up to speed quicker.”

Marion Ali
“So how do you ensure that they don’t get lax now and leave the bulk ah di work on you guys?”

Wayne Usher
Good question. What we’ve done is because we have constituencies that we’re working in we have posted additional people in those constituencies to just keep an eye on these things.”

The clean up drive will be carried out on weekends and the council says it will provide snacks for all community volunteers who want to lend a hand.