Placencia Hopes For Trade License Revenue to Combat Sargassum

With coastlines shrinking and infrastructure increasingly threatened by erosion, Placencia leaders say finding money to address those challenges remains one of their biggest hurdles. While the village continues to push for solutions, its council says limited funding has made it difficult to tackle issues that demand long-term investment. Vice Chairman Brice Dial says village councils rely heavily on a handful of revenue streams and are hopeful that the long-promised rollout of trade license fees will finally provide much needed financial support.

 

Brice Dial, Vice Chair, Placencia Village Council

“At the village council level we get very little funding. Most of the revenue that we know we are going to get every year is from the liquor license board, so for every bar that pays in for their liquor license we get money back for that and then for our fundraisers. So our biggest fundraiser is Lobster Fest, but otherwise we don’t have any source of income that we know we can look to and so we are very excited that trade license is supposed to be coming into effect for village councils. Hopefully they’re saying in January. We’re hoping that this time it actually gets rolled out because I’m sure you know that there’s been at least two times that I can think of that they’ve started to roll it out and then they’ve kind of held back on it. So we’re really hoping that that comes into effect in January and then that revenue stream will help us manage some of these issues that we’re facing.”

 

Trade License fees for villages are set to take effect on January first but with a municipal election scheduled for March, there is belief that date will be pushed back once again.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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