One Road, Two Projects

The rains a couple months ago seriously damaged a number of streets in Belize City. Cemetery Road, which has not seen repair work for several years, was among them. But now that road is receiving urgently-needed resurfacing at two different locations, and what is interesting is that there are two different entities conducting the work. Today, the Belize City Council issued a press release informing that the work that has begun on the portion near the Constitution Park is a project that it is overseeing. That rehabilitation was made possible through funding of a hundred thousand dollars from the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Housing. Meanwhile, the MIDH is conducting rehabilitative work on another portion of Cemetery Road – that four-hundred-foot stretch from the roundabout to the junction with Elston Kerr Street. Chief Engineer in the Ministry explained to News Five today the two projects taking place on Cemetery Road.

 

Evondale Moody, Chief Engineer, Ministry of Infrastructure Development

“The Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Housing is currently doing some works on the George Price Highway from its intersection with the Central American Boulevard near the monument towards Partridge Street. These are some minor works that we had planned for just over a month or month and a half ago that we wanted to execute, but we could not execute that because of the range that we had. And also we wanted to utilize the contractor that we had doing some paving works at the Haulover Bridge, but now that we’re finished with those paving works, we were able to get the contractor to mobilize to that section of the highway yesterday, and I issued a public notice to the media so that they could have shared with the public of these works that we will be executing over the next five days. Basically, the idea is that we had some minor road failures in that little section, whereby the pavement was under some stress because of vehicular traffic that utilizes that section, especially the buses. We have a bigger project, which is called the George Price Highway Upgrading Project, which is the upgrading of the entire George Price Highway from Central American Boulevard to Belmopan. So, that section that we’re currently working on is within section 3 of the full scope of works. And so, we’re trying to limit the extent of works or the extent of funds that we have to spend within that year until we could get the full project up and running later this year. We do not go into the city unless we are asked to do so by those municipalities. However, as MIDH, we’re willing to assist and so they have been discussions between our CEO and also the minister for us to assist the City Council financially to do some works on Cemetery Road, and that will be implemented by the council itself and not by MIDH.”