City Hall says let’s go 50/50 on streets

On Thursday, we aired part one of an interview with newly installed Mayor Darrell Bradley. In part two tonight, the mayor discusses upcoming projects. Because of its limited resources, the Belize City Council is trying a new concept called the fifty-fifty. For businesses and individuals who have disposable income and the interest to see their streets upgraded, City Hall will front fifty percent of the cost, provided that those businesses and individuals do the same. According to Mayor Bradley, the idea will also be job intensive as he intends to employ the Cisco Construction concept.

Darrell Bradley, Mayor of Belize City 

2012-03-23

“We want to deal with the fifty-fifty program and I think people kinda misinterpreted what I meant. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to pay fifty percent of the cost for us to fix your streets. But what we want to do is that for business who can afford and who are willing to do it, if you want to come up with some of the resources to have your street fully paved, to have your drains fully paved then the City Council will match you. And we will work on that immediately as a priority. And I have indicated that even if we have to source the money from central government or we have to borrow the money. If residents are that serious about infrastructure that they are willing to make a financial contribution, we will meet with them. I also have scheduled a meeting with Mr. Woods early next week and there have been very successful programs that his company has run in terms of the building of streets. Of course they insist, and I think it is a very healthy idea; that it is all done manually because they want to ensure that there is also that aspect of job creation and upliftment. And we are looking to partner with other groups like them to ensure how we can deal with this. Of course we are also looking long term in terms of seeing how we can finance an infrastructure redevelopment program. And we are talking about at least sourcing something like thirty million dollars to ensure that we can commit all that resources into street works. We have already met also in terms of dealing with some of our financial providers to ensure that we are able to identify equipment. We are going to be purchasing a roller, a grader and several dump trucks. And I’ve met consistently with our Works Manager and the City Engineer. We did a city tour which took us five hours driving around the streets of Belize City because I really want to be hands on in terms of infrastructure so that people know we are serious. I’ve instructed the Works Manager to be going out doing assessments and he is fixing some of the streets that we can fix and that we can afford to fix. And we have several plans in place where we are sourcing funding for doing Freetown Road; we want to do Barrack Road and we want to do Hyde’s Lane. And we are taking about doing these cemented streets because they last longer, they are a little bit more expensive but it looks better and it is more durable. And so the quality of these streets will be done by way of how Albert Street and Regent Street looks and we are also doing an inventory of all streets.”