B.T.B. pledges a million to CITCO…but with tight strings

The Belize City Council will be receiving some badly needed funds from the Belize Tourism Board … but the strings attached to the grant may not do much to ease the city’s cash crunch. According to a release from the B.T.B., that body met on Friday and agreed to fund a list of tourism related infrastructural projects totalling a million dollars. These projects include a craft market at Memorial Park, the beautification of Albert Street and refurbishing of Battlefield Park. The B.T.B. also insisted on a detailed memorandum of understanding, specific schedule of payments and performance targets as well as a clause that allowed the Board to scrap the agreement if it suffered adverse cash flows in its own income stream. And while all these safeguards could be considered reasonable, even laudable in normal circumstances, the assistance falls far short of what the council had requested, namely a guaranteed stream of recurrent revenue from the B.T.B., based on the volume of cruise tourists that disembarked in the city. In a brief phone conversation this evening with Mayor Zenaida Moya, she expressed her disappointment with the proposal, but told News Five that she needed time to study it and take legal advice before commenting further.