I have to start this Friday’s piece with the great news in Camalote’s world that the government is once again putting in some work on our pathway. If you put in a plug at the MoW for us, thank you, thank you Brother Ramon Witz. As I write this piece, work is being done. A truck is dumping a load of white marl, there is a backhoe carrying stuff, there is a small crawler tractor clearing the path, there is a small roller compacting the marl, and there are a number of workers directing traffic. What a glorious sight!
There is an area on the east side of the village where the culverts/bridges are too close, and there it will take some engineering to extend the pathway. However, where there’s a will there’s a way, and our MoW is showing the will right now. Hope they keep it up, so the children can walk safely to school, the youth and elders can exercise away from the traffic, and you can take a little pasear our way, from end to end of our village.
Paint over broken lines
I don’t know why there are broken lines painted on the highway passing through Camalote. And they are in front of the area where I live!
The way I understand the yellow lines on the highway, two solid lines mean no overtaking, a broken line alongside a solid yellow line means you can overtake if you are on the side where the broken line is, and a single broken line means open road, let it roll. I said there is a broken line in front of the space where my family lives.
I don’t think you can talk concern for people and then put a broken line in a village. The speed limit through a village can’t be the maximum highway speed, 55 mph. I see some people saying that it is 25 mph to 40 mph through a village, but I don’t know that for a fact.
Traffic Safety guys, if you’re serious about it, solid yellow lines should run the entirety of the village. Solid yellow lines should be put there as a reminder to drivers to not be in such a rush. If someone is going really too slow in front of you and you see full clearance ahead, no one has to tell you to take the initiative and overtake.
The broken line sends a bad message. The message is that you’re on a highway, so press the accelerator.
Mr. Torres a disappointment
I have supported Mr. Ernesto Torres’s candidacy for the job of mayor of Belize City (I believe this was during the second-term candidacy of former Belize City mayor Darrell Bradley), because I liked his energy, his desire, and I knew he had much capacity in traffic management and road safety.
I never knew he had such conviction in his knowledge of management until I heard him complaining some time ago on the Krem WuB and on Plus TV about what he referred to as the folly of the present Belize City Council (BCC) to insist that the City Administrator, Ms. Candice Miller, be let go. Now, everyone has a right to an opinion on everything in this world; we even have the right to be foolish/arrogant and say there is no God, but we shouldn’t persist in ignorance. When we persist in ignorance, people start questioning our integrity.
Ms. Miller had been given a contract that extended well past the life of the political administration that had hired her, and when the people of Belize City voted in a new administration, instead of her doing the honorable thing and resigning, she held on.
We all know how that played out. The court said the BCC had to honor the contract, and if the arrangement the BCC made with Ms. Miller after the ruling follows directly from that, as we would expect, then the lady walked away with a sum of money that many families combined don’t earn in their lifetimes. Brother Torres insisted that the new BCC should have kept her at her post.
I had let it go (you know I don’t countenance wrong thinking) because I genuinely like the brother, and as I said, I have a lot of respect for him in his field. Bah, Mr. Torres won’t let it go. Bah, I heard him spouting off recently on the WuB, about the error of the BCC’s decision.
I am not used to people who try to justify things that don’t make sense, or sin. I don’t believe in lying, and I don’t believe in justifying my faults, my failures. If Ms. Miller got what she demanded, then that was a heck of a lot of money to pay out for nada service, yes, but the BCC couldn’t accept the Miller contract. If they had, then it would have become the norm in the country. If they had, people from the outside looking in would have said, “you see why these people can’t make progress, it’s because they want to show themselves and reinvent the wheel that is turning smoothly, and bam, the whole thing ended up in reverse.”
Braa, if you read about the great British, how they do things, people holding the higher administrative posts in an organization get the hell out of there when their political bosses get kicked out of office. Braa, if you read about the great Americans, how they do things, people who hold the higher administrative posts get the hell out of there when their political bosses get kicked out of office. Where is the country on this earth that tells a boxer who should be his trainer?
Sir, we read in The Belize Times or heard on their Vibes that PM Barrow made a tidy package for his chief administrator, Ms. Audrey Wallace, with her television project. I haven’t explored that project to determine for myself if it was proper or not, but I am daam well sure that most everyone would have hollered terrible FOUL if the PM, to smile on Ms. Wallace, gave her a contract that extends beyond the life of his present government.
Okay, it is written in her CEO contract that it doesn’t extend beyond the life of the present administration. The City Administrator is effectively their CEO. Some rules are so common sense they don’t have to be written.
What Darrell Bradley did, just isn’t done, sir: it makes no sense. Thanks to your present BCC for setting the right precedent so that every other administration in this country is put on alert that such ignorance, such a suspect contract, should not be drawn up and signed ever again.
Is Mr. Torres smarter than all the leaders in the great countries? No, he is not. Stay in your lane, Braa, stay in your lane and show that you know where your competence is; do that and maybe I will support you when next you run for mayor.
By the way, you can’t sneeze on me because I don’t vote in your city. A politician needs every ounce of support he or she can get. I just may be able to convince somebody to vote for you. But I will not do so if you persist in your support for very bad management practices.
Just our best
As far as I know, all God asks of us is that we do our best. Whoa, I want to stop this piece right here because I have the best intentions, but my best intentions can upset people and I don’t like to upset anyone. I marvel at people who belong to political parties. They say that game calls for making bed with strange fellows, and I can’t mek bed with what I don’t like.
If I love or like you, expect me to tell you things you don’t like, not all the time, and not much of the time, but any time I think you can do with some chiding. If you find my sincere criticism offensive, I will conclude that you don’t like me, and what will follow from that is no praise, and no criticism.
Some people get real tochiz when they are criticized. Let me say this about criticism. Nobody improves without it. Mr. Lawrence Vernon said that when he was a youth he was a member of a literary group, and whenever any member produced a work they would all read and critique it.
Hey, I can say that we as a people need to be a bit more appreciative of criticism. Ah, all that I want to say, I can’t.