Rogério Bacalhau does not need them to “give him money”, he just asks them to “make an exception to the debt limit and allow the Chamber of Deputies to Faro seek financing from the bank", to guarantee the 30 million euros needed to renew the city's obsolete water supply network, a job that will take around a decade.
The “message” from the President of the Chamber of Faro was given during the opening session of the H2O & Sustainability Summit, which took place at the Penha Campus of the University of Algarve, on Thursday and Friday, the 19th and 20th.
The Farense mayor, in addition to join the choir a demand a much stronger, short-term commitment to desalination in the Algarve, also spoke of the particular case of Faro and how it could deepen its contribution to saving water, moreover, water already treated and ready to come out of our taps.
"In Faro, we are on the order of 20% losses, which is acceptable, but I consider it is still a lot», he said.
«We have teams working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to combat disruptions, we have telemetry, we have done a lot of things in recent years, but we can hardly get it down to 20%, because our network, particularly in the city center older, it is 60 or 70 years old and needs to be completely remodeled», illustrated Rogério Bacalhau.
According to the president of the Chamber of Faro, available data indicates that 30 million euros would be needed over the next ten years to requalify the water supply network. We also can't do everything at the same time, because we would have to send people out of here».
And the problem, these days, isn't even finding the money, it's the debt limit to which local authorities are subject.
«Nowadays, municipalities have the capacity to obtain financing, but the debt limitation law does not allow this. We don't need them to give us money, we don't require them to give us subsidies for that,” he said.
Not that the Chamber of Faro has not taken advantage of the funds available for this purpose: «in the last three years, I have collected four million from European funds to carry out rehabilitation, but that is not enough. But I did it and it was positive».
However, «if there is no capacity to allocate us the funds we need, we would like to be able to go to the bank to do this, without this contributing to the debt limit, because, therefore, we do not have the capacity. Just give us the conditions to improve our network», asked Rogério Bacalhau.
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