Belmopan City Council Clears Social Security Debt, Achieves Full Compliance

The Belmopan City Council is breathing a sigh of relief tonight after it has successfully brought its affairs with Social Security Board (SSB) under full compliance.  It was some ten months ago that Mayor Pablo Cawich took office and found that his predecessor was in arrears of over one hundred thousand dollars with SSB.  In those nine months, Cawich has been able to negotiate payment terms that now has the council with no monies owing to the SSB.  Love News spoke with the mayor earlier today on this major milestone.

Pablo Cawich, Mayor of Belmopan City: “When we took over the council in March 2024 we had an arrears of approximately $100,000 Belize dollars. That is one of the many liabilities that we found out about but through negotiations and discussions with the different entities we managed to agree to monthly payment plans based on our cash flow and thankfully we’ve been servicing all of these agreements. As you can recall we’ve been making changes internally to the council little by little since our takeover. We through this approach we’ve managed to improve expenditure or lower expenditure. We’ve managed to have better results of our existing resources so monies aren’t being pushed into temporary fixes as they used to. We’ve been trying to work with a lot of the business community to get to build up our asset base. If you recall little by little we started announcing we’re getting this, we’re getting that, we’re getting different assets so a combination of the different approaches is what allowed us to have a better financial management and the money has always been there it’s just how the monies have been spent over the past years is what we see as the true problem.” 

Mayor Cawich succeeded Sheran Palacio in March last year after her one-term in office.