Let's Spend Lots Of Money (Me Too)

300 million euros, over 650 different buildings and facilities for sporting, cultural and administrative purposes. These are the bare facts of what the Council of Mallorca and town halls have been spending money on over the past 15 years. In itself, the spend might seem reasonable enough, if it has all been a case of creating necessary infrastructure, but more often than not, this has not been the case. It has been spend predicated on a me-too mentality, spread across municipalities whose sizes rarely justify the spend. It has been spend that hasn't always been spent, as suppliers have not been paid, and spend that has demanded ever more spend, in the form of maintenance; a spend that cannot be made because there isn't the money for it.

Revelations as to the startling levels of expenditure by local authorities in Mallorca have slowly been filtering out. First we learned, two years ago, that personnel costs at town halls had doubled in the space of ten years. Then we learned, last month, that a quarter of total town hall spend is devoted to "competences" that are beyond those which town halls are obliged to spend money on. Now we have the latest facts - the 300 million euros on public swimming-pools, cultural centres, football pitches, buildings for administration and so on and so on.

The swimming-pools are an interesting one. In the north of Mallorca, Sa Pobla leaks a deficit of 150,000 euros a year for maintaining what was the first indoor pool in the area. This pool was followed by the construction of pools in Santa Margalida, Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa; four pools for a total combined population of under 60,000. Maybe this is the right ratio, I really couldn't say, but what I can say is that each pool has been a disaster. Santa Margalida's faces demolition because its leak simply cannot be rectified. Alcúdia's and Puerto Pollensa's have both been beset with problems related to the contractors operating the pools. They all lose money.

The pools have been symptomatic of an absence of planning as to how to run the facilities once they were built and of the presence of an attitude which demands that because one town has something, so must its neighbour. On an island with so many small towns, it has led to a wholly unnecessary proliferation of all manner of facilities and had it not been for economic crisis, there would be more being developed.

A fine example of this me-too mentality was Pollensa's desire for an auditorium. It would have required an investment in the region of ten or eleven million euros. The town hall finally saw sense earlier this year and scrapped the project, one that was always flawed, as there already was an auditorium in Alcúdia, one that has never operated at anything like full capacity since it was built at the end of the last century.

There are other examples. Take the industrial estate in Alcúdia. Blocked off to prevent vehicle access and so hopefully stop more copper cabling being nicked, its layout was finished three years ago. There is still not a single unit on it, the reason for which, supposedly, is an inability to arrive at an agreement over electricity supply. If this really is the reason, why was something so fundamental not sorted out much earlier on? One fancies there are other reasons, and one only has to look at the empty spaces on industrial estates in neighbouring towns to know what they might be.

Less extravagant are the day-to-day expenditures for facilities like kindergartens and day centres, yet these expenditures cannot be met, mainly because the regional government doesn't give sufficient funding. But in a way, this sums up the whole issue of how infrastructure and facilities came into being. Town halls expected the flow of cash from regional government to continue, the regional government expected the flow of cash from national government to continue, and national government was probably still under the impression that Brussels would be handing over blank cheques.

There is much to be said for towns and villages all having different types of facility, as they add to a sense of community and of identity, but - and this raises once more questions as to the viability of the continuing existence of town halls in their current state - this has come at a high price, one paid for through a system of local government that was allowed to grow like topsy without sufficient or any thought being given to where this system was leading. We now know where it has led.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.