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Last November the Belize City Council signed a contract with UDP friendly contractor RJB construction for the repair of nine streets. East Canal and West Canal are complete but Eyre Street, Chancellor Avenue, Racoon Street, Ebony Street, Gibnut Street, Third Street, and Allan Pitts Crescent are far from done. 

So, now that the UDP is out and the PUP is in city hall, will those streets ever be finished? Well, we spoke to Mayor Wagner and he said he was not happy about the contract, but there is hope for completion.

Sahar Vasquez
"I know the UDP had a contract with RJB to do a lot of streets and they were working on a credit system. Will they still be hired? You still have streets like Raccoon Street that was in the works. Will that be finished by them or will you all hire someone else? How will that work?"

Bernard Wagner - Mayor of Belize City
"Well, obviously it is unfortunate that these contracts were undertaken in the eleventh hour. We know the reason for that political engineering and political electioneering but we know that the contract has been signed. The works have to continue. We want to provide the best infrastructure for our people and so we will certainly look at the contracts and look at the terms. The terms of the contracts are important and if we need to renegotiate those terms we will undertake a renegotiation of those terms. We have met with Mr Berges and we are committed to those streets. They are already in the pipeline. The thing here is that we need to ensure that for the future council that those type of transactions you burn fire on those transactions. Nothing good comes out of a transaction that the past mayor and the past council undertook."

"I am certain those contracts were not in the budget. They were off budget and local government needs to begin to take stock of these things. Local government needs to become more active and police those matters in terms of being close to an election and the municipal government and the mayor and the administration takes on contracts. It is a situation that I will never get myself in. It is a situation that our council will never get ourselves in."

The project's total cost was estimated to be about 2.6 million dollars. The council had promised to pay RJB Construction over a three year period.