San Pedro Poised to Gain Big through Sister-City Ties

The San Pedro Town Council is making some big environmental waves by establishing sister-city relations with Clearwater City in Florida. Mayor Wally Nunez just returned from a visit to Clearwater and shared with News Five that they’re looking to partner with their U.S. sister city for help with turtle nesting, conservation practices, and even cultural tourism exchanges.

 

Wally Nunez, Mayor, San Pedro

“They are big with conservation. They have a marine aquarium that – I look at it more like a rehabilitation center than an aquarium because when you talk about aquarium, everybody thinks that they’re just gonna go and look at the animals and they’re in captivity. But these animals that they have there are in rehabilitation or they have been taken there because they cannot be released in the wild. So, they’re big with dolphin conservation. They have turtles. They have already started with manatees. They have partnered in Gales Point here whereby they have a place that they are assisting with the manatee conservation. We are looking at different ways that they can assist us here in San Pedro, maybe later on open a rehabilitation center here for turtles because we have certain issues with turtles here. Who knows, probably later on a movie which would showcase our beautiful island and of course the culture of Belize. And these are things that we are looking at as partnerships with different or other municipalities, other towns and countries that we can benefit and they can benefit from an exchange like this. I met with the mayor of Clearwater. I had the privilege of meeting him in his office. We had a very good conversation and he is very excited about it. He actually made a post about it on his Facebook page. So it looks very promising and the marine aquarium is fully on board with us. This trip wasn’t only about the marine conservation and the aquarium and the sister city relationship, but also, we took the opportunity to go to the eastern part of Florida to see where they’re doing beach restoration, more on a nature-based solutions. We are looking at the different ways that they have been working on the beach, how they have been creating their dunes, how it protects them from different elements with respect to the storms, beach erosions, how they’re tackling all of that because we need to work on our beach solution as well.”