Garbage debt is cut from 15 weeks to 9

A “dirty” dispute that erupts every so often – but which intensified during the course of last year – is the sanitation debacle caused by tension between the Belize City Council (CITCO) and one of its sanitation contractors, Belize Waste Control (BWC) – which has only recently simmered a bit due to an attempt by the Council to address the outstanding arrears that are at the root of the dispute.

In February of 2013, BWC – a sanitation company that provides services to the Belize City Council – got a court order to summon the Belize City Council to pay outstanding arrears which was owed to them (BWC) for garbage collection, a debt figure that had ballooned to 2.3 million dollars.

As part of the court ruling, the City Council was supposed to pay $653,000 to BWC on December 20th, 2013 to service the enormous debt.

However, when that date came around three weeks ago, CITCO was only able to pay $300,000 due to apparent financial constraints.

In a press conference that was held by CITCO on December 31, 2013, Mayor Darrell Bradley said that City Hall has made some significant payments to the sanitation company, which has alleged that it had to dismiss employees and scale back on its operations in order to stay afloat.

The Mayor declared that for the first time in over 10 years, City Hall has paid that long-standing debt in full – a debt that he emphasized that his administration did not accrue. At the same time, he said that the Council is diligently working to reduce the amount currently owed to BWC for citywide sanitation services.

Mayor Bradley — who has insisted that no one can get ‘blood out of stone’ – said, “We had agreed with them on a 1-million-dollar write off. We had paid $600,000 at that point. This morning, I signed the final cheque and so we have paid them off that full 1.2 million dollars.”

On Monday, December 23, BWC’s attorney, Fred Lumor, confirmed to the media that his client received a cheque for $300,000 which was about half of outstanding dues that the court ordered City Hall to pay in April of this year as partial settlement of the ensuing arrears that have been owed to BWC.

CITCO opted to pay the Belize Waste Control a total of $653,000 by Friday, December 20th as settlement of the arrears which Waste Control got the court judgment to enforce.

Up to early December, the Council was behind in arrears of around $750,000 and BWC administrators declared that they were forced to dial back their operations in order to send the City Hall a clear message that they were at the point of cancelling operations due to mounting bills owed to its creditors.

Since that face-off, CITCO has been feverishly trying to iron out those 15 weeks of arrears which has been a nerve-wracking task for the Mayor, Darrell Bradley, who referred to the contracts with the sanitation companies as “unreasonable.”

He informed that despite the challenges that they (CITCO) face, his administration is currently “in a relatively good financial position” although it will take some time to get out of the debt. Bradley explained, “It’s going to take us a little while – we can’t accelerate more than that because remember that we have BWC, we also have BML and we also have other debts that we are trying to clear off. We are in a relatively good financial position. We are trying to work as best as we can with the sanitation companies to advise them that we are going to make good on our commitments with them. They are a top priority; the collection of garbage is an essential service, but it will likely take us until the middle of February, perhaps the ending of February, to completely bring their debt to a zero balance.”

Unlike CITCO’s contract with the Belize Maintenance Limited (BML) which expires this year, the Waste Control contract expires after this Mayor’s term does. Bradley has said that he does not plan to renew the contracts. “That will bring our cost for sanitation services substantially down and it will record a savings of 4 million dollars to Belize City,” he explained.

According to Bradley, the previous Councils made a “horrible” decision to enter into those contracts with the sanitation companies because it (CITCO) simply can’t afford to pay both sanitation contractors and still function optimally. He has repeatedly lamented that the City cannot continue to pay both BWC and Belize Maintenance Ltd. (BML) because payments as stipulated by these contracts deplete up to 45% of their annual revenue.