City Hall services now tied to overdue citizen bills

Darrell Bradley

Motorists, property and business owners are being affected by the latest plan devised by City Hall to collect outstanding revenue owed in taxes. The Mayor says that persons who owe the city will have to pay up if they want to continue using services offered by the city.  City Hall’s newest way to collect income is through drivers’ licenses. So if you are going to renew your driver’s license while owing either trade license or property tax, it will be necessary to have additional cash on hand. Many residents have been turned away from license renewals and are driving illegally because they can’t pay outstanding taxes. But the Mayor says that will kick in if you owe more than three years in taxes.

Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor

“We are in the process of for the first time linking all our databases so that our property and our trade database is linked with our traffic database. So that we have one master system which indicates to us every single resident and what every single resident procures in terms of services from the City: if you have a driver’s license, if you own a business, if you have a liquor license; if you own property and paying property taxes. And because we are connecting all of those systems, we have set a policy to say, if you owe us on any one of your accounts, then we will not provide services to you in respect of any service that you procure from the city. And the reason being is that it is very costly to provide the services that we provide. And this mechanism in terms of improving our technology has allowed us to be more efficient in collections. So if this person goes and they want a driver’s license, the system will pull up whether they owe any property taxes and we are asking them to settle the property taxes before we issue the driver’s license.”

Jose Sanchez

“Many people are saying it is hard times; they can’t necessarily pay. So is there a systems that’s going to be in place to say whether or not that they can still get the service; can they come to an agreement?”

Darrell Bradley

“By and large about ninety percent of the people who this has affected, essentially what we require is that you would put a down payment on whatever areas that you owe; and we are not talking about one year. So if you owe one year property taxes or trade, you will not be flags. The system only flags you if you owe three years. And so what we are asking is if you owe three years of arrears, we are requiring that you put down payment and you would enter then with us an agreement where you are going to commit to retiring that within a certain time. So we are not going to prevent you from getting your driver’s license, but you would have to get some sort of agreement that we are really serious  on the collection of areas—arrears of property and trade.”

Jose Sanchez

“This is something that you don’t need to get legislation for? This is legal.”

Darrell Bradley

“It is legal and it already provides in terms of some of the existing legislation. For example, trade license. The legislation specifically says that a person can be denied a trade license if they owe the city any fees. So you have to be current. What we are doing is that we are moving ahead to ensure that that kind of framework and mechanism is in place in all our existing legislation or our policy. At present this is only a policy of the City Council, but we want to move ahead to ensure that we are on all fours with the laws in treating people fairly. We do understand that times are hard, but we are on a very aggressive timetable in terms of the construction of streets and the restoration of our city and we depend on revenues in order to get these street work funded.”