Six top employees resign from City Council

Could six of the city’s top employees come together and submit a joint letter of resignation … without the mayor having a clue that anything was wrong? That’s the question tonight as Mayor Zenaida Moya tries to deal with the biggest challenge of her sometimes controversial term of office. She spoke late this evening to News Five’s Janelle Chanona.

Zenaida Moya, Belize City Mayor
“Even if they had a problem directly with me, of which they have already indicated that their decision has absolutely nothing to do with myself as mayor, again they have stated both yesterday and this morning that they are happy with me as mayor and they appreciate my way of doing things and my positions. So it has absolutely nothing to do with myself as mayor and they’ve made it abundantly clear. How some things are done in other quarters; that’s another story. And so I feel it is imperative that I sit down with them and try and work out how we can have them stay. We have very good directors. We have committed directors that I feel have the council at heart and has Belize City at heart and there would be no reason to simply, I feel, just accept the letter without trying to negotiate with them for them to stay. Clearly, if there were directors that were not working out, that were incompetent, that were not committed, then probably you could say, okay well fine, but that is not the case.”

“They have concerns of with how some of the decisions and the processes are in the council, in particular some of the decisions that are made via the caucus and so pretty much that is their concern. We will have to work out to ensure that no kind of slowdown happens in operations and I don’t believe there have been slowdowns, the directors have continued to work and they also maintained, they have maintained their operations, but also they have had I believe several meetings today amongst themselves. So I feel that the operations are going along well and I think that speaks well on their part.”

Janelle Chanona
“Any reason why you don’t want to say who exactly in involved in this?”

Zenaida Moya
“We have the City Administrator, the City Engineer, the Director of Financial Services, the City Planner, the Director of Human Resources and we have our P.R. Manager.”

Moya has not accepted the resignations and says a meeting has been scheduled for two-thirty Thursday to discuss the matter with the disgruntled employees. She remains optimistic that her management team will remain intact.