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For the past 2 days, members of the Association of Professional Engineers of Belize have been attending a training session at the Inspiration Center called pavement workshop.

The problem is that The Ministry of Works has noticed that whenever the Government puts different construction contracts out to tender, very few Belizean engineers apply. That worries them, because the country has to then go to the international community to identify a qualified contracting firm. 

The Ministry of Works wants to see more Belizeans awarded contracts, and so, they invited the Association of Professional Engineers to conduct this training in the hopes that the local talent will start to qualify. 

The organizers of the event invited 7News to drop by for the workshop, and we spoke with them about it today. Here's what they told us:

Lennox Bradley - Chief Engineer, Ministry of Works
"The Ministry of Works is partnering with the Association of Professional Engineers of Belize to start introducing our local professionals, both consultants and contractors, to road infrastructure design and construction. We have started this year with pavement design, looking at the different types of payments that we use in Belize. We use slurry seals, prime coats, double chip and seal, hot mix asphalt, and concrete pavements. We partnered with Association of  Professional Engineers because the Government is becoming a bit concerned about the non-participation of local professionals in the road construction business here in Belize. As you are aware, the Government is investing substantially in improving our road infrastructure, and we notice project after project, the local professionals that are involved with the procurement, the design, and the supervision of road construction in Belize. It is extremely limited. It is worrisome to us, and so, we got together with the Association of Professional Engineers, and asked that we try to do something about it. We came up with this idea of starting to introduce pavement design and construction, the different options, trying to get the local professionals up to scratch with cutting edge technology in these areas."

Carlton Young - VP, Association of Professional Engineers
"The objective is the provide the proper training to our local engineers, which is the part of the mandate of the Association of Professional Engineers. We have done past trainings in seismic design. We've done some in certain structural materials, but we want to going to other areas of engineering. We feel that pavements is one of the things that we need to look at in Belize, because a lot of investment is happening in pavements. So, there are many different kinds of pavements. There's the ubiquitous chip seal asphalt pavement that we have used a lot in Belize, and continue to use. There's what's called asphalt concrete, which we call hot mix, but there are other forms of it, that we're moving more and more towards. And then, of course, there are concrete pavements. So, we're looking at all those 3 types of pavement construction."

The workshop finishes tomorrow. The organizers tell us that the experts conducting the training are professors from the University of California Davis, which has a very strong engineering program.