It's been exactly 112 days since the PUP City Council slate were elected to City Hall. Since then, they've been thrust head on into the hurly burly of public administration, running a council that's often in the red, and juggling scarce resources while facing a tide of rising expectations.
Today, the Deputy Mayor, Oscar Arnold discussed those first 100 days - which has been like jumping into a moving car that's barreling downhill.
He told us that this administration met unresolved issues from the last Council, and they've had to make those challenges a priority for immediate resolution.
He discussed emergency measures:
Oscar Arnold, Deputy Mayor, Belize City
"We have done rehabilitative work, repair work on about over sixty streets. A big problem that we met when we came in and wasn't a part of the plan was the manhole covers that were missing on many streets and people were getting injured by them, people with diverse abilities, mothers walking home with their children; that sort of stuff. So we have been able to replace over two hundred of those and we enact a study to be done as to how many still outstanding and we have a little over twelve hundred and so we are giving priority to areas around schools and then main arteries - Albert Street, Orange Street, Freetown and then the side streets that feed into these main arteries."
"So Mayor is embarking on a plan where we will have those covered over the next 2 and a half months. Outside of that, we've also had our social infrastructure that we look at' we've had the grief therapy that is ready to be kicked off. Major work was also done on the Municipal Public Accounts Committee, but the literature and everything has been put together for that. Mayor again will have to go over that at a council caucus because we will then have to approach Ministry of Local Government just to have them know that we want to enact that as a policy first before, because if it becomes law, then it pretty much covers all the municipalities. But at first at least if we can present where it says that it will be a policy for the Belize City Council, then we can move forward with that."
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