Mayoral Aspirants Debate Before The Media On Increase Of Taxes

In the first segment of our newscast, we told you about the City Council’s Audit Report that aspiring Mayor Yolanda Schakron and Belize City Mayor, Darrell Bradley, spoke of. Both mayoral candidates held a press conference for about an hour in which the city’s audits were not only the key subjects. It became a “she said-he said” with Schakron stating that Bradley has plans to increase taxes- a notion he strongly refuted.

YOLANDA SCHAKRON

“I have heard that they will increase taxes if they win again. That would really be unfortunate first of all if they win and to increase taxes. As we walk around this city the cry of the people is ‘we are being overtaxed’ we are burdened with tax. You cannot burden a community with tax, the community will fail. The businesses are failing at this time. What I can tell you is that we will not increase taxes.”

MAYOR DARRELL BRADLEY

“There is absolutely no plan to increase any taxes and again I ask members of the public to treat with this as what it is, it is election propaganda. We have been working for the last three and a half years, we have been disclosing every bit of information all of our plans when we did our residential garbage fee for a period of eight months we went out there on public consultation talking this thing up we were on Open Your Eyes, we were on Love, we were on Krem, we were on Wave, we did public consultations regarding this. We were talking with the utility companies in terms of how we would deal with collections so that our mantra has always been to deal with consulting with residents before anything like that has ever happened. There is absolutely no plan for us to do any tax increases and I would charge residents of Belize City to take that with a grain of salt because they have absolutely nothing so that the only way to get some kind of traction is to try to attack somebody who is working.”

YOLANDA SCHAKRON

“I will tell Darrel this; I will talk to Darrel straight. Darrel you are a Christian I am also a Christian and we know that as Christians we have to be fair and we have to speak the truth, so I will tell him Darrel ‘mek wi hear di truth’.”