Vítor Aleixo wants to recover municipal services, in terms of human resources and is willing to carry out “an institutional fight” with the Government and “hire, if necessary, more people for the services”. The recently inaugurated mayor of Loulé considers that, in the past, there was "a kind of ideological agenda or, at the very least, a prejudice regarding the capacity of the Chamber to respond" and wants to invert this reality.
"Whatever is in my hand, in the sense of being able to bring to the Chamber people who can work in skills that were very well exercised over the years, which were handed over to private individuals and are even poorly exercised today, I am willing to do, to reconstitute these services," he said.
The new mayor from Loulé, who headed the PS list to the Chamber in the elections held on September 29, was the guest of this week's radio program “Impressões”, jointly promoted by the Sul Informação and by Rádio Universitária do Algarve RUA FM (102,7 FM). The program originally aired this Wednesday and can be heard in full again on Saturday at 12 noon.
“I'm ready to stretch the rope to the limit, to be able to do what I think is reasonable and can create jobs, with conditions that are not as aggressive as those that people find today in the private sector. And I believe that the municipality can effectively exercise competences in the area of water, sewage, gardens and urban cleaning maintenance», he considered.
Vítor Aleixo considered that there are "sectors of the chamber that were deliberately impoverished". "There was always the prejudiced attitude that things had to be handed over to the private sector, because the officials of the Chamber are turnips and don't know how to do things, or they do them with poor quality and that the private is good", he accused .
«What we have seen over the years is that this is nothing but prejudice and dogma, because, often, private companies also fail, they are much more expensive… they have their flaws. I do not share that point of view and, as I am a person with strong political convictions, I will tend, in my mandate, to redo the administrative and technical services of the Municipality of Loulé», he reinforced.
A task that is not easy to guess, since the order coming from the central power is to cut down on civil servants and there are strong restrictions on the hiring of new employees.
“If the reconstitution of services involves hiring more people, we will have to find a way to do it. Because it's not easy. The contours of the law are very tight, but we are here to fight this fight, because we are people of causes», he assured.
A posture that links directly to the fight that Vítor Aleixo assumes against the privatization of municipal services. Something that does not mean, even so, the intention to move municipal companies, even those that result from partnerships with private companies and call themselves competences in the areas of cleaning and maintenance of public spaces.
The cases of the companies Inframoura, Infralobo and Infraquinta, responsible for managing the public areas of the county's three main tourist areas, are different, defended Vítor Aleixo. "This corresponds to a requirement of high quality demand in the treatment of urban space and the supply of public goods and has to do with the fact that we consider tourism as the economic activity of excellence in Loulé," he said.
Although they result from a partnership with private companies, namely with the tourist operators of Vilamoura, Vale do Lobo and Quinta do Lago, «the municipality holds a majority position in these municipal companies and, in decision-making terms, keeps all its capacity intact».
Comments