Luís Gomes, Mayor of Vila Real de Santo António and PSD/Algarve, argues that the government should, depending on the decision of the Constitutional Court on the 2013 State Budget, deepen the reform of Municipalities, with the proposal in the meantime postponed, for the creation of larger scale administrative entities between municipalities.
For the social-democratic mayor, "it is time to decentralize central and local authorities, creating municipal structures and competences at an inter-municipal scale, in order to aggregate municipal competences and companies from various municipalities".
This reform is also, in the view of Luís Gomes, “a change in the economic paradigm. On the one hand, it expands the financial capacity of these new structures and, on the other, allows for a rational and coherent management of existing resources».
For Luís Gomes, this «must be the moment to finally be able to move forward with the deepening of the expansion of competences between municipalities in Portugal, carrying out a structural reform of the territory and a profound political reform. The central idea is not to extinguish city councils, but in confluence areas to transfer competences to larger scale municipal structures and entities, as they already exist in Spain and France».
“The diagnosis is made by the Government. The studies have already been prepared, so it is possible to legislate in the sense that in 2014 we can have a new administrative reality, with a direct impact on next year's budget».
The President of the Chamber of VRSA is also of the opinion that “this is the political moment. Finally, the Constitutional Court opened the door to a task of this dimension that now requires more vision and willingness to structural change and that we must take advantage of the important steps taken by former minister Miguel Relvas to go further».
Luís Gomes also adds that “many mayors are aware that the problems of Local Administration cannot be resolved with separate measures and that the Government, Civil Society, Political Parties, Associations and Unions can finally reach a fair agreement and prepare the country for the post-troika period'.
Comments