Email

Print

Last week Saturday, Belize City Mayor Bernard Wagner and his Council officially celebrated the completion of the second year of their first term in office at City Hall.

In that time, the mayor and his council have consistently maintained that they have had to clean up after an era of reckless spending by the Darrell Bradley Administration.  And while that is an old and well-worn PUDP political saw, the PUP say that a recently completed audit by Cedric Flowers has confirmed what they long knew.

The auditor closely reviewed the council’s accounts for March 2018, when Mayor Wagner and his team took office after the municipal elections, and March 2019, the completion of their first year. We haven’t had an opportunity to read the audit report for ourselves, but the Wagner Administration is celebrating it as proof positive of all the accusations they made of their predecessors. 

The Mayor hosted a press conference today, intent on taking a victory lap to celebrate how his council has carefully pinched pennies and cut costs to bring the council back to fiscal stability. 

And while the Mayor has been stingy with spending, he was lavish with the self praise today and judicious management of public funds:

Bernard Wagner - Mayor, Belize City Council
"The audit that I’m speaking about is for 2 periods. It’s for [the] period ending March 31st, 2018. That’s like 21 days after we got elected, and then for March 31st, 2019. This is the audit here. We want to share it with the media eventually, but it has to go and be signed off by caucus, and I believe we have a caucus within the next week or so, Councillor. So, as soon as we have passed our resolution to accept the audit, then we will certainly be able to pass on to the media houses. Clearly, you can see, from a revenue standpoint, that we went up 9%, and that is very important. That’s a benchmark. In most businesses, when you get a 10% growth, that’s very good. If you get 5%, it’s good."

"March 31st, 2018, March 31st, 2019, we grew by 9% in terms of how we collected revenue. What made up that 9%? Property taxes, going from 8.3 million [dollar] that we collected in 2019, to 9.1 million dollars in 2019. I wanna thank the staff for being able to raise our collection ratio. When we took office, the previous council was mired between 60% and 65% collection ratio. We were able to challenge our staff and took it up to 74%. So, that means dollars at the end of the day. I want to take it up to an 80% collection ratio."

"Traffic, another area, another key area. That’s one of our key revenue areas. Revenues for traffic, when compared to 2018, increased by 32%, going 4.5 million in 2018, to 6 million in 2019. This was driven by traffic wardens’ proactive approach in enforcing traffic laws, and an increase in registered vehicles and licenses. These are the two major revenue earners for the traffic regime. Trade licenses grew by 7%. In all areas, we are seeing growth, you know, in all areas, going from 5 million [dollars] in 2018, to 5.4 million [dollars] in 2019. By the way, this reversed a 3-year trend that saw downward trending in trade licenses. If we continue with the same measures that we are doing, we expect our revenue in all areas to increase."

"We are saying that Belize City has approximately 2,300 registered businesses, with about 1,700 businesses not being registered. These are operating under the radar, they are not in our system. So, we feel that with the new leveling of the playing field, with the new trade license reform that we anticipate will be in 2021, those 1,700 unregistered businesses will then be incentivized to come on board and to begin to pay their fair share. Liquor license, again, grew by 2% from $499,000 in 2018, to $511,000 in 2019. What drove that? People begin to comply, and we started to enforce. That has been widespread across the city. Our enforcement has driven that 2% growth, and also more businesses coming on stream. Funding from GOB decreased by 45%, going from $2.9 million in 2018, to 1.6 million in 2019. And that 1.6 million doesn’t come to us. It goes directly to the Central Bank to pay for Darrell Bradley’s bond. We at this council have performed extremely well, given the conditions we met."