Before being elected president of the Council of Mallorca in 2011, Maria Salom described the Council as an expensive and inefficient behemoth. At the height of the economic crisis, someone had seen the light. The Council had accumulated responsibilities which had meant that it had taken on a life of its own, duplicating efforts elsewhere and being a drain on the public purse. One such responsibility was for tourism promotion. In early 2012 this responsibility was formally withdrawn. The Balearics Tourism Agency (ATB) didn't assume this responsibility as such, because it already had it, but duplication had been eliminated. Eighteen months later, the Bauzá government decided to hand the responsibility back and to give the other three island councils the same responsibility. Salom was unimpressed. She said that she did not want the Council to have to take on the responsibility again.
Just over a year since the regional government decided that it would transfer responsibility, it has now formally approved the measure. Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera can happily set about their promotional plans and expect to receive funding from Palma in order to do so. Mallorca can do the same, but Salom refuses to accept the responsibility. She doesn't wish to revive the behemoth.
In announcing this measure, tourism minister Jaime Martínez appeared to suggest that Salom's rejection was a "different scenario" to one of previous agreement on behalf of the four councils. He is I'm afraid not portraying the "scenario" accurately. Salom has been consistent in her views. As if Bauzá couldn't get more opposition to his decaying administration, he now has it, and it comes from one of the most senior figures in the Partido Popular who, back in the days post-election when all was rosy for Bauzá, was totally onside with a governmental policy of cost-cutting and duplication eradication. Salom has stuck to her guns. Bauzá hasn't.
No doubt stung by the criticism of the paltry sums that Carlos Delgado had budgeted for, Martínez says that there will be a total of 5.3 million euros for tourism promotion in 2015. This is still not a king's ransom but it is twice this year's budget. So, the budget will rise as will other costs. They are bound to so that the island councils can have the funcionarios who'll spend their share of the tourism promotion dividend, while duplication will return. Why? Well, the ATB, though it will be pared back, will have to assume responsibility for Mallorca's promotion and it will still conduct promotion for the Balearics as a whole, while providing a supervisory function in order to ensure that the islands' efforts don't conflict with overall Balearics policy, which could well amount to requiring signing-off these efforts.
The islands have always undertaken some of their own promotional work, and they have been entitled to under the list of competences granted to them by the statutes of Balearics autonomy. Bauzá invoked these statutes in explaining why the responsibilities were being transferred in a formal fashion and with budgetary allowance from Palma. He was being disingenuous. These competences have always existed. The principal motivation was not doing things by the statutes' book but was a way of trying to keep Menorca and Ibiza sweet; they have both long lobbied for greater responsibility.
The devil as always will be in the detail, but as Martínez possesses an unerring capacity to make obscure what one would hope would be transparent (as with holiday lets for instance), there may well be scope for different interpretations of other aspects of this responsibility transfer: islands' own policies, their own development plans, their own organisation of planning of their respective tourism sectors. What actually might these mean? The government insists that it is not handing over the overall co-ordination and classification of tourism products and other elements of the Balearics integrated tourism plan, but there has been a suggestion that the councils could act independently on something such as holiday lets. Menorca wants to, though the government says that it can't. We'll see.
As a general principle the islands having responsibility isn't such a bad idea. Balearics branding and promotion make far less sense than branding of island names that carry greater weight in the minds of the tourism public. However, there should be a cautionary note, and it comes from Menorca. Promotion that has been undertaken by its council to promote the island's Biosphere Reserve status was slammed a year ago. Twenty years of this status and Menorca had made precious little of it, the consequence of a lack of skills as well as money and of bureaucracy that has constantly hampered efforts of businesspeople. Menorca will be getting more money (though not nearly enough) but it won't be getting more skills or less bureaucracy. In Mallorca, meanwhile, none of this will matter because Salom, wisely perhaps, doesn't want the headache or the duplication.
Showing posts with label Maria Salom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maria Salom. Show all posts
Monday, October 20, 2014
Monday, October 22, 2012
The Angry Councillor: Mallorca's local government
Maria Salom is angry. So it is said. I wonder just how angry she really is.
The president of the Council of Mallorca is unhappy because the regional government - her mates in the Partido Popular therefore - are not parting with cash and handing it over in order to fill the Council's piggy bank. Short of some 220 million euros, Salom says that there will be no alternative but to pass responsibilities that the Council has to the government.
I don't buy the anger thing. It sounds as though Maria is paving the way for doing what an awful lot of people have been saying should have happened ages ago, i.e. letting the government take on responsibilities. The logical conclusion of letting it do so would be to wave goodbye to the Council. So long and good riddance.
As president, Maria has to be seen to be defending the Council, if only for political consumption that is devoured by a minority of the island's population. She can't actually come out and say that it would be preferable if the government were to assume responsibilities, as this would leave her open to accusations that she had been deliberately working towards this aim. But she can profess anger and at the same time still demonstrate her credentials in having been able to lop off some of the Council's huge debt.
Salom has managed to eat into this debt, and boy did it need eating into. In August last year it was said to stand at 329 million euros. This, to put it into perspective, was only 26 million euros short of what the Balearic Government has now requested in the form of rescue payment from Madrid. To say that the debt was massive would be an understatement.
Before she was elected as Council president in May last year, Salom had gone on record as saying that she intended eliminating functions that the Council had managed somehow to accumulate. She described the Council as an expensive and inefficient behemoth, a description it was impossible to disagree with. Some of these accumulated functions have been dispensed with, such as the Council's own tourism set-up, but the Council still requires goodly amounts of funding. 220 millions worth it would appear.
The Council's existence has rightly been drawn into question for all sorts of reasons. It is an unnecessary level of administration, it has been a vehicle for handing out jobs to the boys and girls and for having engaged in some highly suspect expenditure, and has also managed to fritter away money that it was meant to have spent on those responsibilities that it should have been attending to. You might remember the 100 million that was earmarked for road building which was said to have gone elsewhere.
For all this though, the Council is only a relatively small part of the total public administration. It was the case not so long ago that it accounted for only 5% of the total number of public employees. Even without the Council, funding would still be required. Moving the chairs around and handing responsibilities to a different public body would save only so much.
The Council, however, has come to be seen as symptomatic of waste and of excessive administration. And this isn't only in Mallorca. In Ibiza the population is 132,000. There is a Council of Ibiza plus five municipalities. It is a legitimate question to ask why there is a need for a council when four of these municipalities are of sufficient size (over 20,000) to have taken on the types of responsibilities that towns of over 20,000 are obliged to take on. Another way of looking at it is to ask why there is a need for the five municipalities.
The laudable aims of decentralisation which led to the establishment of the islands' councils have fallen into disrepute because of the way that public administration in the Balearics has managed to follow Parkinson's Law pretty much to the letter. "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" was the original law, but what Parkinson was driving at specifically was the capacity for bureaucracies to expand over time. The more levels of bureaucracy, the more Parkinson's Law is compounded.
Salom was of course right to describe the Council as inefficient, but the solution to the inefficiency demands a more radical approach than the elimination of certain functions. It requires an overhaul of public administration in its totality. I don't know that she is angry. She should be happy to have made the first move in effecting this overhaul.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The president of the Council of Mallorca is unhappy because the regional government - her mates in the Partido Popular therefore - are not parting with cash and handing it over in order to fill the Council's piggy bank. Short of some 220 million euros, Salom says that there will be no alternative but to pass responsibilities that the Council has to the government.
I don't buy the anger thing. It sounds as though Maria is paving the way for doing what an awful lot of people have been saying should have happened ages ago, i.e. letting the government take on responsibilities. The logical conclusion of letting it do so would be to wave goodbye to the Council. So long and good riddance.
As president, Maria has to be seen to be defending the Council, if only for political consumption that is devoured by a minority of the island's population. She can't actually come out and say that it would be preferable if the government were to assume responsibilities, as this would leave her open to accusations that she had been deliberately working towards this aim. But she can profess anger and at the same time still demonstrate her credentials in having been able to lop off some of the Council's huge debt.
Salom has managed to eat into this debt, and boy did it need eating into. In August last year it was said to stand at 329 million euros. This, to put it into perspective, was only 26 million euros short of what the Balearic Government has now requested in the form of rescue payment from Madrid. To say that the debt was massive would be an understatement.
Before she was elected as Council president in May last year, Salom had gone on record as saying that she intended eliminating functions that the Council had managed somehow to accumulate. She described the Council as an expensive and inefficient behemoth, a description it was impossible to disagree with. Some of these accumulated functions have been dispensed with, such as the Council's own tourism set-up, but the Council still requires goodly amounts of funding. 220 millions worth it would appear.
The Council's existence has rightly been drawn into question for all sorts of reasons. It is an unnecessary level of administration, it has been a vehicle for handing out jobs to the boys and girls and for having engaged in some highly suspect expenditure, and has also managed to fritter away money that it was meant to have spent on those responsibilities that it should have been attending to. You might remember the 100 million that was earmarked for road building which was said to have gone elsewhere.
For all this though, the Council is only a relatively small part of the total public administration. It was the case not so long ago that it accounted for only 5% of the total number of public employees. Even without the Council, funding would still be required. Moving the chairs around and handing responsibilities to a different public body would save only so much.
The Council, however, has come to be seen as symptomatic of waste and of excessive administration. And this isn't only in Mallorca. In Ibiza the population is 132,000. There is a Council of Ibiza plus five municipalities. It is a legitimate question to ask why there is a need for a council when four of these municipalities are of sufficient size (over 20,000) to have taken on the types of responsibilities that towns of over 20,000 are obliged to take on. Another way of looking at it is to ask why there is a need for the five municipalities.
The laudable aims of decentralisation which led to the establishment of the islands' councils have fallen into disrepute because of the way that public administration in the Balearics has managed to follow Parkinson's Law pretty much to the letter. "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" was the original law, but what Parkinson was driving at specifically was the capacity for bureaucracies to expand over time. The more levels of bureaucracy, the more Parkinson's Law is compounded.
Salom was of course right to describe the Council as inefficient, but the solution to the inefficiency demands a more radical approach than the elimination of certain functions. It requires an overhaul of public administration in its totality. I don't know that she is angry. She should be happy to have made the first move in effecting this overhaul.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Rationalising Tourism
A fortnight is not a long time in Mallorcan politics. It has proven to be a very short time when it comes to the organisation of the island's tourism politics. Two weeks ago, 27 July (Guilty By Associations), I wrote about all the various bodies that litter Mallorca's tourism industry, little knowing - but always hoping - that there was about to be some tidying up. One of these bodies, the Fundación Mallorca Turismo, is to have its foundations dug up. It will collapse into the island's dusty ground whence it should never have been allowed to rise in the first place.
Responsibility for all tourism promotion and affairs is to be handed back to the regional government and to the Delgado tourism ministry. The Fundación, which falls under the Council of Mallorca, will be wound up.
One imagines the decision was not a difficult one. The Partido Popular, in charge of the Council and the government, has made it clear that it will seek to eliminate duplications in public administration, and the divvying up of tourism responsibilities between Council and government was one of the most obvious and one of the most absurd.
During the last administration, the Council and therefore the Fundación had acquired ever more responsibilities for tourism. Not all were duplications, but some, especially those in respect of promotion most definitely were. Quite what the thinking was, was hard to fathom, yet one partner in the old administration coalition, the PSM (Mallorcan socialists), had sought even more tourism powers for the Council. It was hard to fathom because tourism is central to Mallorca's economy, and so should be right, slap bang in the heart of the government, not in an island authority. The PP is righting this mysterious wrong.
One area of responsibility that will stay with the Council is that for the Mallorca Film Commission. Going to the ministry, in addition to general promotion, are various others, such as the commercial missions to China and so-called product clubs - for cycling tourism and the other tourism "alternatives". What happens to staff is not entirely clear. There will probably be some jobs found for them at the ministry, but underlying the scrapping of the Fundación, in addition to the wish to get rid of duplication, is an unstated sense of the PP being determined to also get rid of a system of jobs for boys and girls. And it is this system which raises a huge question mark over the whole of the Council of Mallorca.
Maria Salom, the president of the Council, has announced that the Council is up to its neck in debt to the tune of 329 million euros. It is some way short of the debt that the regional government has, but it is a public debt that Mallorca can ill afford to have hanging over it and it is a debt that is hard to understand, for the simple reason that it is hard to understand what the point of the Council is.
Salom, you begin to think, is like a chief executive sent in with the express purpose of rationalising a business within a conglomerate; rationalisation that is usually a euphemism for elimination. The left are expressing their concerns that this might in fact be the intention. Coming on top of the announcement of the closure of TV Mallorca, also under the Council, the winding up of the Fundación might indeed represent a step in the direction of what the PSIB (the Balearics wing of the PSOE socialist party) is claiming is a process of seeking to "liquidate" the Council. Salom, to emphasise the point, has said that were the Council a business it would be declared bankrupt.
I make no bones. I'm not a PP fan. But the left are surely barking up the wrong tree when they see a political agenda to what, were it to come about, would be sound public administration. I've argued the case for cutting back the Council or getting rid of it for some years. Not for political reasons, clearly not in my case, but for organisational reasons. And with the island's public finances more or less down the pan as it is, then quite how sustainable the Council is, is a very reasonable question to pose.
PSIB seems to think that responsibilities for the highways and social well-being would disappear along with the Council. This is crazy. The government is just as capable of administering these as the Council is. The fact that such responsibilities are granted to the Council under agreements relating to the running of the autonomous community of the Balearics doesn't mean to say they have to be granted.
I see no political agenda. This would not be a Thatcher-style vindictiveness, one that put paid to Ken Livingstone's GLC. It would be straightforward pragmatism, something that the left seem not to appreciate.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Responsibility for all tourism promotion and affairs is to be handed back to the regional government and to the Delgado tourism ministry. The Fundación, which falls under the Council of Mallorca, will be wound up.
One imagines the decision was not a difficult one. The Partido Popular, in charge of the Council and the government, has made it clear that it will seek to eliminate duplications in public administration, and the divvying up of tourism responsibilities between Council and government was one of the most obvious and one of the most absurd.
During the last administration, the Council and therefore the Fundación had acquired ever more responsibilities for tourism. Not all were duplications, but some, especially those in respect of promotion most definitely were. Quite what the thinking was, was hard to fathom, yet one partner in the old administration coalition, the PSM (Mallorcan socialists), had sought even more tourism powers for the Council. It was hard to fathom because tourism is central to Mallorca's economy, and so should be right, slap bang in the heart of the government, not in an island authority. The PP is righting this mysterious wrong.
One area of responsibility that will stay with the Council is that for the Mallorca Film Commission. Going to the ministry, in addition to general promotion, are various others, such as the commercial missions to China and so-called product clubs - for cycling tourism and the other tourism "alternatives". What happens to staff is not entirely clear. There will probably be some jobs found for them at the ministry, but underlying the scrapping of the Fundación, in addition to the wish to get rid of duplication, is an unstated sense of the PP being determined to also get rid of a system of jobs for boys and girls. And it is this system which raises a huge question mark over the whole of the Council of Mallorca.
Maria Salom, the president of the Council, has announced that the Council is up to its neck in debt to the tune of 329 million euros. It is some way short of the debt that the regional government has, but it is a public debt that Mallorca can ill afford to have hanging over it and it is a debt that is hard to understand, for the simple reason that it is hard to understand what the point of the Council is.
Salom, you begin to think, is like a chief executive sent in with the express purpose of rationalising a business within a conglomerate; rationalisation that is usually a euphemism for elimination. The left are expressing their concerns that this might in fact be the intention. Coming on top of the announcement of the closure of TV Mallorca, also under the Council, the winding up of the Fundación might indeed represent a step in the direction of what the PSIB (the Balearics wing of the PSOE socialist party) is claiming is a process of seeking to "liquidate" the Council. Salom, to emphasise the point, has said that were the Council a business it would be declared bankrupt.
I make no bones. I'm not a PP fan. But the left are surely barking up the wrong tree when they see a political agenda to what, were it to come about, would be sound public administration. I've argued the case for cutting back the Council or getting rid of it for some years. Not for political reasons, clearly not in my case, but for organisational reasons. And with the island's public finances more or less down the pan as it is, then quite how sustainable the Council is, is a very reasonable question to pose.
PSIB seems to think that responsibilities for the highways and social well-being would disappear along with the Council. This is crazy. The government is just as capable of administering these as the Council is. The fact that such responsibilities are granted to the Council under agreements relating to the running of the autonomous community of the Balearics doesn't mean to say they have to be granted.
I see no political agenda. This would not be a Thatcher-style vindictiveness, one that put paid to Ken Livingstone's GLC. It would be straightforward pragmatism, something that the left seem not to appreciate.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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