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Posted By: Marty Belize City 20% Discount- a thing of the Past - 01/10/19 11:54 AM

It has often been a tradition for the Belize City Council to offer a substantial discount to entities that pay their taxes on time. The yearly, fiscal tradition it seems had only benefited people who are well to do and not the cash strapped public. Belize City Mayor Bernard Wagner told Love News that this initiative that started under the previous council is no longer viable.

Mayor of Belize Bernard Wagner: "That 20% program that you continue to dwell on in our view as a council does not speak to solidarity. The people who access those 20% discount programs are actually people at the higher level, it does not impact the people at the lower level none at all and so we made it a concerted effort to ensure that we did not engage in that 20% discount. You have to understand that you are collecting 80 cents for every dollar and there is no way that you can sustain that in the end and that is why the previous council always ran into financial problem. You are getting the 80 cents out of every dollar early but then down the road that 20 cents is not coming in and we have stayed away from that and we did that deliberately and we have performed well, we have survived the period where the Prime Minister had indicated that we would have failed in June. We have passed that bench mark and we are well underway to ensure that we never see those days again."

The measure was initially started under a UDP City Council.

LOVEFM

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