When it took office in March 2021, the San Pedro Town Council informed the nation that it had found a system of corruption at its traffic department, where an investigation had unearthed that employees there at the time had used computer technology to scheme up fraudulent traffic stickers and fake documents that were issued out, instead of the legitimate ones that were used during traffic transactions. Raids at two homes yielded incriminating evidence and it led to a temporary shutdown of the traffic unit for a full investigation. Charges were levied and those who were culpable were terminated. A new system was put in place last April and May. One year later, Mayor Gualberto Nunez told News Five that all’s going well.

Gualberto Nunez, Mayor, San Pedro Town

“I think everybody knows the discrepancies that were in the council. There was so much corruption going on, but we have been working tirelessly since day one. I decided as the mayor, with the councilors that we would not sit and complain. We have changed a lot of things and the way we operate in the Council. For example, we have a new system in place; we can see exactly who is doing what, what types of work is being done, any changes, it’s there in the system. You can see it. There’s no form of corruption that can take place if we have this system in place. We changed the design of the (traffic) stickers, which was a square. We changed a different design, we changed the serial numbers; different features were put in place so that we can start to have a correct number of how many vehicles are on the island. The traffic committee is also assisting us with the flow of traffic and with the amount of vehicles being imported. There have been moratoriums in place for taxis and for different types of private vehicles.”

Channel 5