And while the work continues, the City Council only has the funds to pave so many streets at a time, which is why they are working on a new initiative that will allow the residents of those streets to assign their property tax directly to street repairs. Here's what the mayor told us about that...
Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor
"One of the things that we are evaluating as a city council is that we wat to create a program whereby if you and your neighbors want to get together and you want to have your property taxes assigned to the improvement and when I mean improvement, I mean the cementing or the hot mixing of your street. What we will do is that we will give you a credit on your property tax bill for a certain period. That's the same thing that we did when we did Moho Bay Street, when we did Daly Street. We had significant partnership from members of the community. We recognized that we have a problem with sourcing funding. But we also recognized that in certain communities, people may want to say well I want to know what my property is being done for, so that we are formalizing a program. We've done it adhoc in these one off streets, but we want to formalize a program whereby if neighbors get together and neighbors well I want to improve my street, they combine resources of our property taxes for the next 3-5 years, will raise 50% of the proceed to cement my street, the city council will give me 60% credit or 50% credit or 70% credit on those monies that I pay and then the city council will put the balance in relation the remaining 50% or whatever percent. Then we can say that that can be a viable alternative."
According to Bradley, the City Council has paved around 150 streets. The city has about 500 streets.
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