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.