The San Ignacio and Santa Elena town council is the only municipality where there are two UDP representatives, Mayor Earl Trapp and councilor Berne Fernandez. Because of this dynamic, there are five councilors, who are fighting to wrest control of the council’s finances as well as administrative decisions which are the sole purview of the mayor.
So it is that on Tuesday, the councilors, who call themselves the Fantastic Five, wrote a slew of demands formatted as resolutions to be presented to the Mayor on Thursday, June 24. Among them is that “the Mayor who is a directly elected official of the Town Council does not subsume the entire authority and powers vested in the council, but rather such authority is divested to the entire Council and its Councilors.” They are also asking for office space for the Deputy Mayor and the Councilors; they want to cut the Mayor’s phone allowance. The everyday administrative roles of the Mayor and Town Administrator is also being challenged where “weekly and monthly work schedules (maintenance and construction) to be submitted to council”, but they do not stop there. They also want to have the authority to hire and fire staff where they say, “the council shall have control of all officers and employees of the Council.”
And it seems that their demands have no end when they ask, “that social assistance of $51,600 be distributed equally by all duly elected council members.” They even want to sponsor sporting events; want to be able to hire a new director for the Cayo Welcome Center and for good measure “the Council resolves that the council by majority fires and hires officers and employees of the town council and not the mayor alone.” Keeping in that vein, they resolve that the sanitation supervisor, Mr. Chan, and Traffic Manager, Mr. Herrera, be terminated.
Then they take to have petitions which are not necessarily unreasonable with the exception of one where they ask that “pantry will be handed over to portfolio Covid-19 under the leadership of Councilor Aaron Mai.”
It seems that fantastic as the councilors claim to be, they have not yet read the Town Council Act which vests everything they are asking for solely on the Mayor.
The meeting will be broadcast live by the Town Board at 3:00p.m. on Thursday.
