7 News Belize

Palm Grove Doesn’t Want The Apartment Complex
posted (February 21, 2014)
Last night, 7News showed you a small part of our story on the Palm Grove residents who want to block the building of an apartment complex in their neighborhood, because they say that it's private property where their security and peace of mind will be disturbed.

We'd interviewed them an hour before news time, and so tonight, we have their full comments to us:

Stephen Heusner - Resident, Palm Grove
"They are proposing to build a 5 story apartment building on a very small lot which is about 75' x 100' and it just seems out of the ordinary to cram a building of this size on such a small property."

Omar Gomez - Resident, Palm Grove
"I am here supporting my fellow residents, my neighbors and expressing our grave concern for the parking facilities that are inadequate for this proposed building and obviously the destruction of the entrance to the properties, it's a one exit and one entrance private property only and with this proposed building going up, we don't know who will be coming in and who will be going out and the lack of parking space will inconvenience the fellow neighbors and parking on the street would be very inadequate."

Nadine Espat - Resident, Palm Grove
"I live here for quite a while now and from since I live here the area, the empty lots has been very high and we call the city council once or twice or maybe more and ask them who should we speak to, to see if they could come and clean it or something. The said to us that that's private, they cannot do anything about that - just the outside of the community and not the inside. So we decided as a community all of us here to together and start asking for everyone to chip in so that we could find somebody to keep the area clean because the grass and the bush is very high, anybody could come in here and hide. Our concern is to keep it clean, but now they are saying that its public. Suddenly it's public, but before it was private. I don't think that's fair because public is public and private is private."

Sylvia Perdomo-Sutherland - Resident, Palm Grove
"This is going to be an apartment complex that God know who all will be coming up here. It's been a safe area, we do everything together as a community, we have put together to put a security gate to let it be a gated community - those are all things that we have done on our own to safeguard where we live. People in Belize, everybody keeps on saying you are wasting your time whatever - people in Belize needs to stand up for what they believe in and I feel strongly about having area that are zoned. We live up here, we came out of the city because we wanted to get away from all the nonsense that goes on, you have residential neighborhoods like on 6th Street, Baymen Avenue, Princess Margaret Drive and we are trying to get away from that. We need people to start to voice their opinions when it comes to the zoning laws and start to pressure our government and our mayor because he also has a family, people have families and they want to safeguard their neighborhoods and we moved up here like I said because we wanted to be in a safer environment."

Barry Reimer - Resident, Palm Grove
"The main thing is that is a private residents, all of us here living in this area are home owners and so we have a close nit community where we all have a neighborhood watch. We know who comes in and who comes out and it's easy to have sort of a neighborhood watch, so if strange people come in, we call each other and say you know what, have a lookout. But if we have an apartment building over here, I mean, nobody knows is it a 6 months contract, a 3 moth contract, it's a 5 month contract and so a lot of strange people can come in, so where is the safety in the community? How can we monitor who is supposed to be here and who is not supposed to be here and in addition to it I mean if it supposed to be a 3,4,5 story building - it doesn't even have

space. There is no space for traffic in this little area, so the biggest concern is the safety of our kids, of ourselves so that we can monitor the neighborhood."

Melinda Heusner - Resident, Palm Grove
"I would like to ask the mayor if he is going to allow this building to go up, if he would consider the residents of Palm Grove and have them access their building from the highway instead of coming into our community."

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