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Today, local government leaders from 7 towns and 2 Cities fathered at the Biltmore to learn how to tax you better! It's called "revenue enhancement" and the event is organized by the Mayor's Association – after all, to keep your municipality going, city and town boards have to generate revenue.

Ideally, these towns and cities leaders want to be independent, and able to fund their own programs without having to rely too heavily on the government subventions.

We spoke with the coordinators about the ways that revenue generation is expected to improve:

Eugene Palacio - Director, Local Government

"What we have is a first of a series of training at a aim of capacity building of the council, strengthen the capacity of the council to carry out their functions. Local government is set of roles and responsibilities given to a municipal council by the central government and a set of revenue sources which they administer to carry out those sources. And so the mayor's association met with the ministry, the minister and the ministry and identified training needs as one of their priorities and the ministry accepted that. And so in collaboration with the mayor's association the ministry is having a series of training with the municipalities. This is the first one. The first one is budget preparation exercise and revenue collection enhancement."

Mayor Darrell Bradley - President, Mayors Association

"The city and town administrators together with the mayor's association determine that the topic has to be revenue enhancement and budget and planning because that's a significant challenge that confronts the municipality. So that today we have presenters like Troy Smith who's the valuation for the city council. He is presenting on the valuation role, how to keep the role accurate and some of the challenges that are there. We have Margret McKenzie who is the legal council for Belize City. She's talking about the regulatory framework and the authority of the municipality vis-à-vis all the various licensing and all the various revenue components of the municipality. We also have other presenters from other municipalities who will be speaking. We have representatives from the ministry of local government and this is being done in partnership and collaboration with the ministry of local government - so that Eugene Palacio the director of local government is very very in tune and he's here throughout the whole day assisting us with the set up and of course it's been sponsored by the ministry of local government in partnership with the Belize mayor's association. But the idea is that municipalities can solve a lot of their challenges if we work closer together."

At the end of today's workshop, Mayor Bradley and Local Government Minister Godwin Hulse handed out certificates to the participants.

The Mayors Association has agreed that they want the technical leaders from the different municipalities, namely city administrators and other key persons, to meet every 2 months. Also, the Mayors are want to have an exchange program where leaders from the different municipalities get to temporarily transfer to another town or City Council.