7 News Belize

Mayor Comes Up With Plan For BML Workers
posted (January 6, 2015)
Next week Friday, on January 16, 158 sanitation workers from Belize Maintenance Limited will be reporting for their first day of work at the Belize City Council.

Viewers may know that this is one day after City Hall's contract with that sanitation company expires. The mayor hoped he could get a big break on the council's expenses by letting go of that hefty contract, but after the Sanitation Workers staged a daring garbage protest, Prime Minister Dean Barrow had to step in and guarantee them all employment at city hall.

In late 2014, Mayor Bradley resisted that mightily but just before Christmas, he came around, and decided to make it work.

Today, he held a press conference to announce that after a much brainstorming and planning, he and the rest of the council has come up with a low impact plan to take the sanitation workers on. Bradley told us how it will work:

Darrell Bradley, Mayor - Belize City
"The main issue really is dealing with the BML transition. We had indicated with the company itself BML as well as the Christian Workers Union, we are communicating and in discussions with them to deal with the transition from the sanitation contract which currently is being operated by BML to incorporating those employees within the confines of the Belize City Council. It total it will be a 158 employees who will make the transition into Belize City Council employment on the 16th January of this year. That's next week. We are scheduling an orientation for them which is the 16th. As I mentioned we are already in communication with the managers and the owner of that company Mr. Larry Ellis, who is cooperating with us quite fully in relation to providing information to assist with the transition. One of the things which we have found out is the 158 persons is actually above what we need in terms of our assessment. So, when we assess what really the capacity of the City Council and what amounts of staff we would need to deliver effective service, we came up with a number of 110. But in terms of the commitment to BML, that commitment was that the City Council would take on the full complement of staff. So, what we are doing is that some of these people who meet a certain skill set, for example, some of them are supervisors, some of them are security officers. Not all of them perform direct sanitation services. So what we will do is that we will reassign those persons who fit the skill set to other areas of the city council where we have a shortage, for example, right now we need city council people to be traffic officers, we need some persons to be park wardens and we will use some of the people who we don't need directly on the ground to fill these posts with the city council."

"We recently enacted the municipal services regulations and what that does is that that converse tenure on all municipal staff, so that when these people come onboard on the employment of the Belize City Council on the 16th January, they will come as permanent employees and they will be protected by the tenure provision. Meaning that we cannot fire them. So that they will come onboard, they will be introduced into the regime of the municipality, but we have been working very strenuously over the last 3 years since I have been mayor to really raise the caliber of city council employee through training and through other incentive and merit based."

When these employees join, the total staff number at the Belize City Council swells to 428. The City was paying BML $78,000 weekly for its sanitation services. Bradley says that the technical people at the council have estimated that it will cost the Council $40,000 per week to provide the same services, which means that there is a weekly savings of $38,000.

Government has also facilitated this transition by procuring 1 million dollars' worth of equipment for these new employees. Additionally, Government was paying $35,000 weekly as part of the bill to BML which goes toward salary of the employees. That arrangement continues, but according to Bradley, the Prime Minister hasn't indicated when those payments will stop.

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