Reform: Making Town Halls Smaller

The national government's finance minister, Cristóbal Montoro, has unveiled proposals for the reform of local authorities. The new bill already has general support from within the Partido Popular and from the main opposition PSOE party. It should eventually be passed without overly much debate.

The reform is badly needed as it tackles excessive costs incurred by town halls and addresses competencies that town halls have assumed but for which there is no legal requirement for them to have assumed. These are the so-called "impropias" competencies, some of which have led to duplication of responsibilities and of course to strains on town hall funding.

The bill is primarily a finance bill. Anyone who had hoped for a radical restructuring of local government will be disappointed. The government is not proposing that town halls be scrapped, though it is saying that authorities will be done away with if they do not function efficiently. A key part of the bill involves centralisation of specific services under the control of regional governments or provincial authorities, of which the Council of Mallorca is one. The Council, again to the disappointment of some, does not appear to be headed for the local government scrap-heap.

The services which are due for centralisation are any tasks related to education, health and social services. A further provision in the bill will see the number of paid councillors reduced drastically by over 80% to 12,000 in the whole of Spain and limits placed on the level of compensation that mayors and other councillors may receive. And yet another provision envisages that towns with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants (the overwhelming majority of municipalities in Mallorca therefore) will lose responsibility for other services. The government anticipates making a saving of 7.12 billion euros as a result of the reforms.

Reaction at municipal level in Mallorca has been mixed. Inca is one town hall where satisfaction has been expressed, as the reforms will mean a significant lowering of the financial burden and the annual deficit at which the town currently operates. Less supportive is reaction which suggests that the municipalities are the best authorities for deciding what local people need.

There is no "best solution" for how local authorities are organised, only one that is least bad. There will always be tensions between highly local sentiment and demand and centrally-driven, rationalised administration. A move towards greater centralisation does not herald a return to the days of control in the hands of Madrid and pretty much Madrid alone; it is a pragmatic, sensible and overdue measure, one that some would argue doesn't go far enough. But as it stops short of eliminating local authorities, except in worst cases of inefficiency, the new law represents a compromise; the government should be given credit for balancing local sensibilities with the urgent need for rationalisation.

The reform will also mean that there will be job losses and curbs placed on the employment of temporary staff and on the contracting of advisors. The government is, therefore, furthering its efforts to cut down the bloated public sector. But it faces a problem. Apart from any job losses, there is another urgent need that it has to address, and it is a cultural one.

The government has been talking up its plans to foster entrepreneurialism, even if it hasn't put any real flesh on the bones, but such entrepreneurialism is hard to foster when the nature of employment has been as skewed towards the public sector as it has been and when the climate of this employment has been risk-free (little threat to jobs) and essentially control-based as opposed to innovative.

At the presentation organised by the regional government's Centre Balears Europa in November, a spokesperson from the institute for business innovation made a very telling observation - that public-sector employment has been seen as the preferable option because it is risk-free; much of it demands little by way of initiative or proactivity. And this control-based public sector culture has endured since the days of Franco. It is one that is ingrained and will take enormous efforts to change and so, the government would hope, bring about a more dynamic society imbued with the principles of service, innovation and entrepreneurialism.

But a start has to be made, and attacking the hugeness of public administration, with its multiple and duplicative layers that have created ever more employment with little or no value added is one way. Things are going to take time, though. And time is something of which the government does not have huge reservoirs.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Changes anticipated to Pollensa town hall administration

An observation here in line with what I have been saying about the make-up of Pollensa town hall's administration, i.e. that there will have to be changes, now that the coalition between the Partido Popular and La Lliga effectively no longer exists, the consequence of the merger between La Lliga and the Convergència and the infighting that exists between members of these two parties. They should hold another election, as any solution will be unsatisfactory. Crisis, as ever, at Pollensa town hall.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

MALLORCA TODAY - Pollensa opposition against new councillor

A decision by Pollensa town hall to appoint a further councillor, at a cost of over 35,000 euros per annum, has been attacked by opposition groups which describe the move as undemocratic (the ruling PP-La Lliga administration functions without a majority) and as having been taken when leaders of certain opposition groups were away for the holiday period.

Our Man In ... : Resorts' delegates

Puerto Alcúdia has now got itself a delegate. Lucky old Puerto Alcúdia. The post-election re-organisation at Alcúdia town hall has deemed a delegate to be necessary, when previously it hadn't been. Does the port need a delegate? Maybe it does, but it has done well enough up until now without one.

Having delegates for towns' coastal resorts hasn't exactly been a great success elsewhere. They have been viewed as being toothless or simply lackeys of the mayor. This was the case in Can Picafort, for example, while in Puerto Pollensa the ex-delegate was considered, not to put too fine a point on it, to be a joke. The lack of respect that Francisca Ramon commanded came to a head when she addressed demonstrators in June last year. The volley of abuse that came back made it clear that she was thought to be "stupid".

The delegates for the resorts are at least a recognition by town halls that their resorts do have specific needs. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the very existence of delegates has raised expectations that they might actually do something, when they are hamstrung by having no real authority or responsibility. In Puerto Pollensa the call has long been made for responsibility and also for a separate budget.

The logic of such a call is that the resorts should become their own administrative units. Because of the specific needs, there would be some sense to this, but any sense soon evaporates when you consider the added bureaucracy, costs and potential for duplication.

Were the electoral system to be such that councillors were voted in on the basis of wards, then there would automatically be voices for different parts of a municipality, but this is not how it works. The creation of delegates for the main resorts reflects the absence of such a mechanism, but it is also discriminatory. In Alcúdia, for example, what about Barcarès, Alcanada and Bonaire? Don't they count?

The lack of geographical representation exacerbates discontent, such as that in Santa Margalida. Son Serra de Marina lies some seven kilometres away from Can Picafort and even further away from the town. Residents have complained that the village has been all but abandoned, and there have been examples - inadequate police presence, the deplorable state of the sports centre - which don't help to refute their complaints.

At a more general level, there is an issue as to what councillors are responsible for. Depending on its size of population, each town hall is obliged to take care of certain services. These obligations are not mirrored by what councillors are charged with.

Up to a point this is reasonable enough. The towns have a wider responsibility for general welfare than those stipulated by law. There is no legal requirement, for instance, to take responsibility for tourism, but it would be distinctly odd if they didn't.

Responsibilities such as those for public works and maintenance are clear enough, but some are less so, while the way in which these other responsibilities are jumbled together to form an individual councillor's portfolio leads you to wonder what process is ever used for arriving at what can seem contradictory.

In Muro, for instance, there is a councillor in charge of education and culture and the town's music band. Another looks after environment, youth activities, radio and television (what television!?) and transport. Yet another oversees sport, the police and traffic, and relations with the church. Go through this little lot, and there isn't always a pattern. Is radio and television not culture? Might sport be a youth activity?Would traffic and transport not have some common ground? Indeed, what is meant by transport anyway? School buses? Public transport is not a responsibility of small authorities such as Muro.

It is not as if the responsibilities mirror those higher up the political administration food chain. Regional government has combined agriculture with environment. In Muro agriculture is lumped in with tourism. In Alcudia there is still responsibility for language policy, the regional government having scrapped a specific directorate for it. But what is most evident from the Muro portfolios is what isn't evident. Unless the mayor has taken on personal responsibility for just about everything the town is really meant to look after - services, building works, finance etc. - and has a particularly hard-working governing commission, then no one appears to be in charge.

You are left with an impression, therefore, that town halls find things for councillors to do. Some are important, some aren't. But where they all fall down is in the fact that their chief generators of income and employment, the resorts, get, at best, a delegate and not a councillor with real clout.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.