BML’s Operations Manager On CitCo’s Plan to Address Garbage in 2015

Mitchell Danderson

Mayor Bradley has maintained his hard line where Belize Maintenance Limited is concerned. BML’s contract is worth seventy-eight thousand dollars a week, and Bradley says that CitCo can take over that work – and do it better, for just a fraction of that cost. But BML’s Operation’s Manager Mitchell Danderson isn’t convinced. He started out with the Belize City Council in 1996, when sanitation services were handled by that body. According to Danderson, there’s a reason those services were privatized from the start.

Mitchell Danderson, Operations Manager, BML

“The only time you can ever see this city clean is when it was first privatized, and after. If it wasn’t for privatization this city would not be as clean as it is right now. But still there is a lot of work that needs to be done because since this administration has come in all they have been doing is – oh, the contract is bloated let’s cut it – but they are not saying that they are cutting the pay that the company is getting. They did not say that they are cutting the workers and they did not say that they are cutting the services. So by them doing that they are then depriving the citizens of Belize of the services that are needed. So why are we going to cut again…and we are going to cut more services? The Mayor says that he is going to institute some legislation whereby you would have to clean three feet in front of your house. How many places in the city you know that have three feet. There are places that have far more than three feet in front of your house. You understand? You have the parks, you have the playgrounds, you have the outlets, you have the culverts which were taken away from the private company. We used to do all these things. We used to do all hotspots…now there are only certain hotspots that we are allowed to do by the Belize City Council because they are only going to pay for that amount.”

Danderson told us today that services ARE currently being affected because of the situation at the court with the sanitation workers.