All this year, we've been reporting on the dispute between the Belize City Council and Belize Waste Control where the sanitation company got a court order to collect over a million dollars in arrears.
The Council was due to pay 653 thousand dollars on December 20, but it was only able to pay 300 thousand. Well, at that press conference he held today, he declared that for the first time in over 10 years, City Hall has paid that debt in full, a debt that his administration did not accrue. Here's how he explained the final partial payment which he signed off on this morning:
Mayor Darrell Bradley
"We had agreed with them on 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. We've also paid them a double payment today because again this is our inflows in terms of taxes, so that at this current period we are at 9 weeks. We are expecting to make another double payment the first week in January, we will bring them at 8 weeks and we are expecting that we will pay off the complete arrears immediately, in the middle of February."
"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 about to release our second independent audit and that audit shows that we have close our receivable gaps substantially; the City Council had owed to it 10 million dollars. We have closed that by half (5 million). We have paid off a substantial amount of our debts; social security, income tax and even courts bails that the City Council used to not honor even for staff members. All of that was from previous administrations, not this current administration and we are making strides in terms of the financial situation. We are trying to work as best as we can with the sanitation companies to advised 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 likely take us until the middle of February, perhaps the ending of February to completely bring their debt to a zero balance."
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