Email

Print

Today Mayor Bradley told us that when that is completed, the council has already engaged private contractors to start on the round-a-bout - which is the busiest in Belize. Sounds like pure gridlock stress to us, but the Mayor was unperturbed.

Darrell Bradley - Mayor, Belize City
"Well the approach is going good, the work is being done by our City Council personnel and of course they have other commitments and so that is one of the reasons that the work is slowed a little bit. We have completely finished one side of the approach going towards Save-U and now they are on the other side and that should take two weeks and when that finishes that whole area will be opened up. Another thing that will cause inconvenience is that we've already engaged a private contractor to do the round-about itself. So when they finish the approach, they are physically going to upgrade the round-about and that was part of the Freetown Road project. We didn't do that part of it at that time because we felt that people had gotten a little bit fatigued with the closures and interruptions in traffic. We're doing that now and at this time when at least High Schools are closing, there's a lot of High Schools on Princess Margaret Drive so we won't have that traffic rush and this is part of our plan to do approaches at all bridges - we're going to do the approach to BelChina very shortly, both on the north and south side. We're going to do the intersection with Princess Margaret Drive where SJC is and we're going to the intersection at Central American Boulevard. This is just part of our infrastructure works to upgrade intersections throughout Belize City because we've been advised that the intersections are where you get a lot of potholes. The work is ongoing, we apologize for the inconvenience but when the work is finished we don't have to go back there for another 20 years."

Monica Bodden
"We notice that there has been a slight delay in the paving of King and North Front Street."

Darrell Bradley
"King Street - BWS is still on that street and when they finish their works they have to do pressure testing. A lot of times too frequently the pressure testing fails and so what they have to do even though it appears they are finished is that they have to back and find the leaks and one of the reasons we are working very closely with them in coordination is because we want to ensure that when the works are done, nobody has to go back and dig the streets for a long time. The works on North Front street was the same thing - we were given the green light on parts of the work up until the Douglas Jones intersection which has been completed. We've gone to the other side but again BWS is just signaling to us that they need to do additional work and we always allow them because we want to make sure we get this project right, we're spending public funds and we don't want to be spending monies and having to redo works very shortly within a couple years. Again it's an inconvenience - we're having a lot of the traffic slowage because some of the works we are doing right now, the approach of BelCan bridge, North Front St, New Road - these are major access ways into the city so anytime you do any of these works it will cause interruptions. We have our traffic personnel deployed to try to see if we can alleviate some of the problems and we're trying to have our people work as fast as possible giving the other commitments and priorities and we're juggling within our people and the private contractors so that we can save a little bit of cost. We're coordinating very well so that we have a good product but we apologize for the inconvenience but a lot of it can't be helped, really."

Works on the Belcan bridge approach is expected to be completed in the next 2 weeks.