City signs new contracts with sanitation companies

After months of negotiations, today the Belize City Council signed new contracts with two of the sanitation companies that service the old capital. During brief ceremonies at City Hall, Rupert Marin, representing Sanitation Enterprises Limited and Lawrence Ellis of Belize Maintenance Limited put their respective signatures on the dotted lines. According to Mayor Zenaida Moya, the new deal means that both companies will be accepting more than a third less money.

Zenaida Moya, Mayor of Belize City
?The total savings to the Council will be two million four hundred thirty-two thousand three hundred dollars. This is very significant to the City Council, it represents more. It represents one million dollars more than what we are currently getting in subvention on an annual basis, so clearly it definitely will give us breathing room to be saving this two point four three million dollars. We agreed on a scope of service that would ensure that the city is clean. If one would look at the former contracts, one would see that, for the number of times that certain works were to be done, were not necessary and were not being done. Straight up I?ll tell you that. One of them of course–thirty times a year cleaning of culverts. Our technical team has told us that we need to do so one time. So in even in terms of those areas and those areas would have had a costing to them. As it pertains to certain streets for example, certain streets that were in fact in the contract to say that they were to be swept, but the streets weren?t paved so you can?t sweep those streets. And of course, certain drains were to be swept but what we found out for example was that those drains weren?t cemented, so there were certain discrepancies that from the onset gave us some leeway to eventually eliminate out of the contract. So in terms of scope of service, what is there in these two new contracts for the two sanitation companies and the council are services that are essential and at the end of the day, the city will still be kept clean and maintained in a manner that city residents should feel happy.?

Lawrence Ellis, Owner, B.M.L.
?Well obviously because we took a major reduction in the price, we had to do some reduction of our own. We were at one forty, now we are at eighty people right now.?

Janelle Chanona
?As for your message to the people that you serve the communities, neighbourhoods what would you like to say to them??

Lawrence Ellis
?I would just like to say that to the public that you can see the evidence out there in the city because we were not working. We have been negotiating with the council to get back to working seven days a week, so we are working out some financing to deal with that. Hopefully tomorrow we will discuss that again to do some work seven days a week to get the area that I am responsible for back under control.?

Rupert Marin, Owner, S.E.L.
?It?s workable. There is going to be a bit of reduction in staff, but nothing that we can?t handle. I think we, after so many weeks, maybe months of forward and backward, forward and backward, we have come up with something amicable.?

Janelle Chanona
?What about the service. What can the customers expect from your company??

Rupert Marin
?The quality of S.E.L.?s service will not change. We are going to stay as close as possible to the scope of service.?

The Belize City Council is currently involved in litigation with the owners of Belize Waste Control Limited to ensure that their contracted obligations are being met. In the new agreements with B.M.L. and S.E.L., Waste Control will be responsible for picking up the many bags of trash collected daily by sanitation workers.