On Tuesday afternoon of this week, workers of Belize Maintenance Limited (BML) who claimed their jobs were in jeopardy after the Belize City Council decided to strip their employer, Belize Maintenance Limited, of a $5,000-a-week contract for cleaning up garbage from “hotspot” areas of Belize City and the bagging of street litter and cut grass for removal, carried out a protest in front of City Hall.
The workers had just come from a meeting with their bosses, owner and managing director Lawrence Ellis and operations manager Joe Lawrence, who told them that they had just been faxed the bad news by the Council before lunchtime on Tuesday, with no apparent explanation or warning.
The news sent the workers into a rage and to North Front Street, the home of the Belize City Council, where at one point, a BML truck driver dumped a load of garbage onto the street in front of City Hall to display their dissatisfaction.
But the Council is refusing to back down. Today, we spoke to one of the two City Councilors who hold the sanitation portfolio, Roger Espejo (the other, Dion Leslie, is currently in the United States receiving unspecified medical treatment), and BML’s Ellis, who offered contradicting statements about the history and motivation for the sudden termination by the Council in what is a politically sensitive climate.
Belize Maintenance and Belize Waste Control have separate contracts with the Council, with separate defined responsibilities. BML is responsible for the cutting of grass, clearing of drains and the picking up and sweeping of street litter across the City.
Waste Control picks up garbage thrown out by residences and commercial businesses and also removes the BML baggage.
Councilor Espejo explained that the decision to end the verbal contract with BML had been taken last week at a Council caucus. We have received reliable information that Mayor Zenaida Moya-Flowers cast the deciding vote to end the contract after the Council deadlocked in its initial vote, 2-2, all others abstaining.
Espejo confirmed that he and Leslie voted against, arguing that the decision should not be made “abruptly,” but they were overruled. (The Council presently has ten members after Andrew Faber died last September in a road traffic accident.)
According to Espejo, City Hall’s ‘perception’ was that BML was not “adequately” performing the job assigned to them, which was to bag up piles of garbage from 72 problem areas around the City and to bag up cut grass and street litter that they routinely pick up on a daily basis for Belize Waste Control, who alone is responsible for the removal of these bags, to collect.
Espejo told us, “The reality is that the Council must make these tough decisions all the time, not just at campaign time. We are not in a popularity contest…,” adding that he sympathized with the plight of the workers who came out to City Hall on Tuesday.
At the same time, he pointed out that BML, when they took on the contract, did not specify whether they would be hiring additional workers, and so, he as sanitation councilor finds it “surprising and suspicious” that they would now have had to discharge employees as a result of losing the contract.
The decision had been contemplated for some time at Council level but was delayed, said Espejo, in order to have a “less stressful impact” on employees, moving now as opposed to before Christmas.
Ultimately, he concluded, the Council had to act “in the benefit of the majority of City residents, where we can see that certain loopholes need to be closed, certain areas improved, the service improved.”
Central Government gave its input, through the five members of a Cabinet sub-committee formed some years ago to address the ongoing problems between the sanitation companies, BML and BWC, and the Council. Those members are Ministers John Saldivar, Patrick Faber, Melvin Hulse, Anthony “Boots” Martinez and CEO in the Prime Minister’s Office, Audrey Wallace. The Council’s decision was made after consultation with them, Espejo told us.
There is some contradiction as to when the actual contract began, with BML’s Lawrence Ellis insisting that it began in 2010, whereas Espejo quoted January of 2011. Either way, the abrupt nature of the Council’s communication to BML, Ellis told us, underlines that the Council almost never consults with them in making its decisions, and BML is left to pick up the pieces.
Ellis told us that he spent the afternoon consulting with his attorney, and while he admits making no attempt to hold back the disgruntled employees from going out to City Hall or taking the trucks, one of which ended up being impounded by Police, neither did he orchestrate Tuesday’s events, he told us.
The contract, which he said he took on “as a favour” to the Council and the Cabinet subcommittee after the issue went public several years ago, gains him no profit, and even resulted in the additional expense of hiring 15 workers, plus drivers, mechanics and a supervisor to work only on that contract.
“Ever since we took on the contract, it has not been an issue in the media. You have not heard about the hotspots, because we clean them every day, we bag up the trash and grass every day. We did our jobs,” Ellis said, adding that BML focused strictly on the 72 assigned areas and were not required to clean up hotspot areas that were not specifically listed on the contract, despite public complaints.
According to Ellis, a formal contract regarding cleaning of hotspots was to have been made within a week of the initial agreement, but it was never done. Now, the Council will either have to convince Belize Waste Control to take on the hotspot cleanups, or go back to private contracting, which previously landed the Council in trouble when it was discovered that a relative of the Mayor was being paid for the service.
According to Espejo, Belize Waste Control will be formally offered the contract and the details are being worked out by the administrators at City Hall. According to Ellis, BML, which had agreed with the permission of Waste Control to remove its green bags of cut grass and collected trash to the Western Highway public dumpsite, is no longer doing so, and Waste Control will now have to take this back on. Those bags lying around the City will be cleared by Friday, Espejo told us.
“I will not argue because the Council had all rights to do what they did; we did not have a formal contract. But the manner in which they did it, no consultation, no warning, and we have good and loyal employees that we almost had to let go; that hurts,” Ellis said.
He also refuted allegations made elsewhere that BML was taking on the pickup of commercial garbage, which is the province of Belize Waste Control, saying that while individual employees of his may have been approached, they are suspended if caught at it.
The workers who protested on Tuesday have been reassigned elsewhere on BML’s work roster, but the lingering bitterness and mistrust adds another layer of woe to a Council seeking a new mandate from City residents and facing a crowded field. Ellis has this piece of advice:
“All I ask that they (the Council) be fair. Don’t treat me differently or better or worse than anybody else; no special treatment. If I am doing wrong, come and tell me, but be fair.”