Town Boundaries Redefined in Long-Awaited Municipal Overhaul

Moving now to other news …. After multiple consultations and more than a decade of launching the plan to redefine the borders of each municipality, the exercise is now complete, and all nine statutory instruments have been gazette.  Director of Local Government, Clifford King, has been at the center of the delineation exercises which he says had been placed on the back burner for almost a decade.  Fast forward to today, however, and all nine municipalities are now legally reconstructed to represent the reality on the ground.  According to King, there were some delays but the political will was sufficient to get the exercise completed.  He additionally noted that the growth of the municipalities has called for the boundaries to be redefined.  One particular town that stood out during the exercise was San Pedro.  This municipality saw the largest adjustment made in terms of municipal boundaries.

Clifford King, Director of Local Government: “San Pedro now is really the entire island of Ambergris Caye save and except those areas that are protected, the areas related to Hol Chan and the other protected area in the south I believe, Hol Chan Marine. So San Pedro Town now is essentially the entire island of Ambergris Caye. So in areas like Secret Beach and some of the islands that are very near, those little islets, several of them are now a part of the town. And people will know that persons and people who live on these islets, people who live in the Secret Beach area, do access the town council for municipal services, whether it be garbage collection and disposal, whether it is liquor licensing,  whether it is trade licensing, whether it is no objection for building  piers and docks they do access the municipal body for these services and so aligning the island or the town with the island was an easy sell. And I’ll tell you, when we did consultations out there, people on the island felt that they needed the municipal body to have a bigger say or some level of say in terms of when permits are granted to developers in and around San Pedro. And they figured that if If the town council has jurisdiction for the space, knowing that we don’t have all  access to the central government services right there on the island, that the municipal body would be their first level of governance, their first level of administration to help manage that island. And so people felt very strongly that the town for San Pedro needed to be expanded.”

As the Ministry of Local Government embarked on the delineations, there were many stakeholders to be consulted.  According to King, those consultations included village leaders of the buffering areas.

Clifford King, Director of Local Government: “Ambergris Caye is the entire island, what we know from the south over 26 miles of landmass and all those surrounding islets that’s Ambergris Caye that entire block of land that goes all the way up to Ishkalack if we could call it that. San Pedro Town was just a part of that and the initial boundary for San Pedro just basically took up along the coast from the south to the north to a portion and did not account for a lot of the lands that were closer to the lagoon side. And so basically now the town has expanded to be what is the island really Ambergris Caye. But as we know that that is one of the fastest developing municipality. If you were to see the development images of San Pedro between say 2000 and now 2025 you’d be blown away with the vast level of infrastructural development, commercial development, residential development, just development of lands in that area over the last 25 years has been tremendous. And now this is the responsibility of the town council in the first instance to manage in terms of land use planning, in terms of permitting processes, in terms of trade licensing, liquor licensing. We think here that San Pedro as a municipality has a huge potential to grow into a very productive,  economically booming as it is right now,  but to look at significant growth in the economics and and the development of that entire island, the quality of development on that island.”

It is to be noted that both Belize City and the City of Belmopan did not undergo any changes in delineation which we will explain in a subsequent newscast.