Day of Reckoning Not Far Away…

Over a hundred sanitation workers returned to work on Friday, October 9 after almost two weeks on strike.  They were not on the picket line in front of City Hall on North Front Street trying to bring the Belize City Council to its knees with ridiculous demands for better working conditions, wages, and benefits.  Actually, they are not even employees of the Council.

The workers were on strike in protest against Mayor Zenaida Moya Flowers’s failure to make weekly payments to their employer, Belize Maintenance Limited, the company responsible for keeping the city’s streets, drains, and public areas clean.  As a result of the continuous non-payments, they were unable to collect their full salaries for work already completed with some being owed as many as eight weeks.

The irony of the situation is that while the workers, mostly single mothers, were not receiving their minimum wage checks, Mayor Flowers and her Councilors were still collecting their handsome salaries and perks, thanks to the taxes paid in by the hard working city residents.  To top it off, there are also some Councilors who also collect handsomely from their cushy jobs with central government.  Truly, they do not know what it is to work for every penny of their checks.

Meanwhile, the workers could not pay their rent, utility bills, Courts bill, cable bill, pawn shop interest, send their children to school, or feed their children.  Repossession notice, eviction notice, disconnections, and hungry children crying themselves to sleep became the norm for many who had nowhere to turn for relief not even to the high powered government ministers of Southside Belize City who were uncharacteristically mum during the strike.

It also seems that the Council was trying to strong arm BML to accept their terms of payment even after the owners of the company had dug deep into their pockets on many occasions to meet their payroll.  Ignore Councilor Responsible for Garbage Phillip Willoughby’s feigned empathy for the workers and absurd suggestions such as selling City Hall and the Commercial Center to cover the Council’s mounting debts; these were mere attempts to draw attention away from its gross ineptitude.

And once again, the Council has made a firm commitment to a payment plan saying that it would cover its debts whenever the tourist season kicks into high gear.  This is the period when it collects the chunk of its revenues.  But there is no guarantee that it will meet its intended target, especially with the global recession affecting tourism worldwide.  Moreover, this is not a viable solution for clearing its debts and to ensure the regularity of payment in the future.  It has not worked before.

All would agree that the Council is working with limited resources, but it seems that honoring its sanitation contracts is not a priority.  This was not the first strike by BML workers to get the attention of the city leaders although in mid October 2006 the still single Mayor Moya boasted that the Council would save $2.5 million a year from renegotiated contracts with BML and the now defunct Sanitation Engineers Limited.

Yet, the Council owes BML close to $800,000 this year alone and approximately $3 million over the life of its contract.  And we are not even talking about the amount owed to Belize Waste Control Limited and the Belize Social Security Board.  It is clear that Mayor Flowers knows little about public finance and is showing that she is incapable of running the country’s largest municipal government.

Indeed, the Council has been racked by financial scandal after financial scandal that centers on Mayor Flowers’s penchant for awarding close family and friends with lucrative contracts despite the lack of funds to meet payments.  But none has been bigger than the close to $300,000 still unaccounted for in Mayor Flowers and her finance officers’ fraudulent “under depositing” scheme.

To make matters worse, the Auditor General’s Office has provided evidence that Mayor Flowers and the incumbent Councilors Laura Esquivel, Leila Peyrefitte, Dean Samuels, Willoughby, and Wayne Usher plundered the Council’s funds when taxpayer monies were siphoned off to their reelection campaign to pay diehard United Democratic Party supporters.

It is clear that the Council did not use the money budgeted for the sanitation contracts on other areas of service either.  It has neglected the city’s infrastructure and cannot perform the basics. This has led to the city continuing in a downward decaying state.

On those days that the workers were on strike, the garbage piled up across the city and sat and rotted on the street sides.  The flies and the putrid smell were unbearable in this heat.  Also, stray animals overturned the garbage containers spreading the rotten garbage all over the streets.  It seems that the Council is not aware that garbage collection is essential to public health.

In addition to the garbage, residents have to put up with clogged drains, tall grass and bushes, potholed streets, flooded streets whenever it rains, and public buildings that have been left to fall into a state of disrepair.  The city is fast becoming an eyesore, and it is the first impression that tourists take with them of our country.

The day of reckoning for Mayor Flowers and her Councilors will not be long in coming, and those persons who will ensure that they are kicked off their pedestals and booted out of City Hall will be the very sanitation workers who have been treated with such disdain.  It will be these very persons who have been treated worse than the garbage that they collect off the streets.  Indeed, what comes around goes around, Zenaida!

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