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But while Wagner renounced sacred cows, he says he is keeping his staff.  

Today he made it clear that while city council staff has been living with a 50% pay cut since the start of April, he has no intention of laying them off. On the contrary, he says he’s aware of their suffering and hopes that the council’s slowly returning revenue can help alleviate it.

Cherisse Halsall
"We know that a lot of the staff have been on half-pay for a while. Are you looking at any layoffs at this point?"

Bernard Wagner - Mayor, Belize City
"We don’t want to add to the unemployment figures. I know that in Belize City already we’re looking at approximately 25,000 people already without jobs and if we go down that road we would be contributing to it. So we have to look at how we could as a municipality address it and work along with the staff to get into that middle ground. We know that we cannot sustain, well actually staff can’t continue to be. They have their budgets as well their personal budget and they build their budget around their monthly income and so when we ask them to do that half deferral payment. They themselves will not be able to sustain it and so hopefully when we get back into business this week we’ll be able to look at the cash flow and see where we take it from there. Our revenue stream had dried up significantly down to 10% of what we used to collect. Since we opened back Monday it has picked up a bit. Not to the level that we want it to eventually reach but again it takes planning it takes prudent financial discipline and financial management and I think we have already met payroll for our staff at the half platform again for this payday here and we continue to work the system and we do it with the knowledge that our people are suffering and we want to be able to alleviate any type of suffering for our staff."

We note that other UDP led municipalities councils are consider layoffs - until business picks up again.