<div id="attachment_117165" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width:310px;"><a rel="nofollow" class="highslide" target="_blank" href="http://edition.channel5belize.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Friendly-Municipalities-1.jpg"><imgclass="size-medium wp-image-117165" title="Eugene Palacio" src="http://edition.channel5belize.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Friendly-Municipalities-1-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225"/></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Eugene Palacio</p></div>
<p><strong>It is budget season for the nine municipalities across the country, who feed in their requests to the Ministry of Local Government to be forwarded to the Ministry of Finance for inclusion in the annual National Budget due in March. The Ministry is teaming up with the Belize Mayors’ Association to offer a series of trainings to municipal staff countrywide, and the first workshop was held in Belize City today concerning revenue enhancement and valuation. Director of Local Government in the Ministry, Eugene Palacio, explained the process.</strong></p>
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<p><strong>Eugene Palacio, Director of Local Government</strong></p>
<p><em>“They have two things that really need to be considered. First is the maximization of the collection of your revenue and you have several agencies, several councils that are not maximizing or collecting the amount of funds from the revenue sources that they have. Local government is like this. You have wah set of responsibilities that have evolved to the local council and you have a set of revenue sources that have also been evolved that they command. So you have property evaluation fees, you have stuff like trade licenses, liquor licenses and they are supposed to collect those licenses to pay for services that they should be carrying out. Also they need to collect their money and then two; they need to have the physical discipline to stay within the budget. And so the emphasis today will be a lot on planning. If you want to do something within the next twelve months—starting March/April the fiscal year—then you need to plan all of that and put it in the budget and then you also look at the rates to match that. If it doesn’t match it then you need to make adjustment or you need to identify where the source of funding will come for these things.”</em></p>
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<p><strong>It is budget season for the nine municipalities across the country, who feed in their requests to the Ministry of Local Government to be forwarded to the Ministry of Finance for inclusion in the annual National Budget due in March. The Ministry is teaming up with the Belize Mayors’ Association to offer a series of trainings to municipal staff countrywide, and the first workshop was held in Belize City today concerning revenue enhancement and valuation. Director of Local Government in the Ministry, Eugene Palacio, explained the process.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Eugene Palacio, Director of Local Government</strong></p>
<p><em>“They have two things that really need to be considered. First is the maximization of the collection of your revenue and you have several agencies, several councils that are not maximizing or collecting the amount of funds from the revenue sources that they have. Local government is like this. You have wah set of responsibilities that have evolved to the local council and you have a set of revenue sources that have also been evolved that they command. So you have property evaluation fees, you have stuff like trade licenses, liquor licenses and they are supposed to collect those licenses to pay for services that they should be carrying out. Also they need to collect their money and then two; they need to have the physical discipline to stay within the budget. And so the emphasis today will be a lot on planning. If you want to do something within the next twelve months—starting March/April the fiscal year—then you need to plan all of that and put it in the budget and then you also look at the rates to match that. If it doesn’t match it then you need to make adjustment or you need to identify where the source of funding will come for these things.”</em></p>
View the full article