The Government wants to increase the price of water in the Algarve to help cover the maintenance costs of the connection to Pomarão and a desalination plant in the Algarve, works to increase water efficiency provided for in the Recovery and Resilience Plan.
This intention was revealed by João Matos Fernandes, Minister of the Environment, during an online seminar on the money allocated to water resources in the PRR.
According to the official, the increase “will not be large” and will also be supported by large consumers, namely farmers and golf.
The government official justified the measure with the need to guarantee the operation of two projects that will be "insurance" so that the region has more water available, the connection of Pomarão to the Odeleite dam, a project that costs 55 million euros, and desalination of sea water, which costs 65 million.
«They have to be understood as an insurance policy that we want to introduce in the Algarve», said Matos Fernandes, stressing that desalination «has an environmental impact, its exact location will have to be very well thought out and evaluated with great care».
Its achievement “cannot mean an increase only in domestic consumers. (…) All sectors will have to pay the premium for this insurance», in other words, guarantee the maintenance costs of the project.
In reaction to these statements, the PSD deputies elected by the Algarve came out in public to consider that the intention "is absurd" and "makes the Algarvians to blame for the lack of water".
For Cristóvão Norte, Rui Cristina and Ofélia Ramos, this decision is "a provocation to the region", as it consists in applying to the Algarve "a cost-benefit logic that is not applied to any other project included in the Recovery and Resilience Plan" .
«It is not reasonable that the Algarve, the region most tragically shaken by the crisis, benefits only 1,7% of the bazooka, when it represents almost 5% of the national economy and population and, in what it benefits, it still has to pay for it through the increase in the price of water”, they say.
The deputies also consider that the Algarve "faces the biggest crisis in memory".
"We were already denied the specific emergency plan for the region that they announced in July, but they abandoned it, and now we are going to face increases in the price of water for companies and consumers, which only serves to make the region less competitive", accuse the MPs of the PSD elected by the Algarve
The three Algarve parliamentarians "will address an urgent request to the Government, demanding explanations and the reversal of this decision."
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