“I cannot tell them when they will be paid”: Mayor Bradley

The Belize City Council (CitCo), which was entangled in a fight with the Belize Waste Control (BWC) over outstanding sanitation payments just four months ago, is now in conflict with its other garbage contractor, Belize Maintenance Limited (BML), with regards to multi-million dollar arrears which Belize City Mayor, Darrell Bradley, insists will be paid when CitCo has the financial wherewithal.

Last Friday, June 25, managing director of BML, Lawrence Ellis, told the media that his company is experiencing financial difficulties due to the fact that CitCo owes them approximately 18 weeks, or about three and a half months, of sanitation arrears, which amounts to roughly $1.3 million, and as a result, he will be forced to send home as many as 50 of his employees by this Monday to sustain the operations of the company.

In response, Mayor Bradley called a press conference at City Hall this afternoon, at which he maintained that the issue is recurrent and had been foreseen since December of last year, but nevertheless, the Council is prepared to sit with the company to ensure that BML collects all that is owed to them.

He said, “I had indicated that it’s an annual thing that always happens when the middle of the year comes – we will grow again in our debt, and this is exactly what is happening. The reality is that the problem is not our ability to pay; the problem is really just the size of the outlays. We pay BML $78,000 per week. We pay BWC $51,000 per week, above salaries, above streets, above everything, that’s our biggest outlay… Notwithstanding all of that, we have made overtures to BML; we have
indicated to them that whatever the City owes you, we will pay you, and that has been the position with BWC.

“We have been a very responsible city overall in terms of our debt. When we paid off BWC $1.2 million, I didn’t have that money in a bank, so we are paying all our outlays out to sanitation contractors, and then we also have to prioritize our obligation in terms of streets and drains, and there has been a significant improvement there. All I am saying is that I guarantee that they will be paid. I cannot tell them when they will be paid.

“But what I ask members of the public to recognize is that BML is only one of our headaches; we have BWC, we have streets that need to be built. We are mindful of the fact that we have recently had a spout of heavy rains and we want to get a significant amount of our earthen streets and our concreting done before the heavy rains hit [again].

“Those are things which confront us, and we are looking at other successes, other projects that we want to do and within the context of everything that we are doing, but I think that we have the BML situation under as best as a handle as we can have at this present moment.”

The Mayor stressed that the hefty weekly payments which CitCo must “cough up” to defray sanitation costs, which he reiterated amount to 40 cents out of every dollar that the City makes, have been a severe burden to shoulder, and he is thus thankful that the existing BML contract agreement will not be renewed when it expires come January 2015.

At that time, city residents, in conjunction with the business community, will assume part of the onus to keep their surroundings clean, because, as Bradley asserted, sanitation is not just a responsibility of CitCo, but is ultimately, everybody’s business.

“One of our replacement plans, as it relates to neighborhoods, is to require people to do that for themselves. So in front of your yard, for example, you would be required to clean 2 feet outside of your yard area. So we won’t replace that service by having City Council personnel do that, and that should represent for us a zero cost,” Bradley outlined.

Mayor Bradley further detailed, “As it relates to the downtown areas of Belize City, we are putting in place personnel to do remedial cleaning of those areas. We’re working with the various tourism stakeholders to assist us with the cost of that. BML is supposed to clean parks, so we’re working with identifying of all our parks, and having there being a business entity that adopts each of our parks.

“We have put together a subcommittee chaired by the sanitation councilor, Deon Leslie, who is working with them [BML] on a transition plan. We are reaching out to them in relation to transitioning from their service to our replacement service, because we spend so much in cleaning this city and we [still] do not have a clean city.”

According to BML’s owner, the non-payment has left his company in a tight spot, especially since the $1.3 million debt does not include an additional $2.8 million which is owed to the sanitation company from a 2012 court judgment, which is yet to be paid by CitCo. The initial sum of $1.9 million accrued to its present figure due to compounded interest over the years.

Ellis alleged that he had attempted to meet with the Mayor recently, but to no avail.

He said that it was “disrespectful and slanderous” for the Mayor to make it seem as if BML is the cause of the Council’s financial problems, adding that it was “very irresponsible” for Bradley not to renew BML’s contract, knowing fully well that the employees of BML have contractual jobs.

Today, though, the Mayor countered those allegations, saying, “In respect to them saying that we are disrespectful in relation to non-communication with them, I find that hard to believe, simply because this is a priority for us, since it is one of our biggest contract obligations, and we try to ensure as best as possible that we have these things on manageable limits.”

While the future employment prospects of the BML workers hang in the balance, Bradley alluded that their fate is ultimately the company’s responsibility, not the Council’s, and therefore, the best they can hope for is a possible job with the Council in 2015, but that is not guaranteed, since Bradley also made it clear that the Council simply cannot afford to employ all of BML’s staff.