But the flooding caused by the tides are worsened by drains that are backed up with grass and mud. Around the city, there are several areas with overgrown grass in the drains - the maintenance of which is one of the basic tasks for the City Council. Today the mayor conceded that the system to which the drains are tended to needs to be upgraded. He also explained that while LIU members are supposed to clean the streets as well, it doesn't really help that much.
Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City
"What we are doing, I will admit it, and so since I came into office in 2018 we have noticed that the sort of system we have in place to address maintenance of drains, maintenance of streets is not working and so we are currently putting in place a new system, it's a grid system, it will powered by GIS mapping and being able to map out the entire city and have the city divided up to grids and we are currently looking at 31 grids across the city, we will have teams assigned to the different grids and the teams will have cutting team, patching team, drainage team so that when we look at our console, if a complaint comes in on grid 14, we will immediately be able to look at grid 14, who is the team there, who is the captain, who is the manager there? This is your area, this is your grid, please attend to it. I think that would be more efficient, I've seen it work in the Los Angeles area."
"That has always been a challenge with the LIU program, we have had challenges where we don't think we get sometimes value for our money but it's not the city that runs that program, it's - what's the young lady's name?"
Reporter:
"Yeah but I don't know that they are the ones, I thought it was in conjunction with the city."
Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City
"No, they have their own liaison, we had a team that was doing chopping and maintenance, we shut it down. LIU has their own system, management system, all we do for LIU is essentially serve as a conduit for payment."
Email
Print