The main restaurant street in Olhão, Avenida 5 de Outubro, currently being dug up, is to have more pavement space for diners. Work is progressing slowly with businesses complaining of a severe drop in low season trade.
The Council, aware that the civil engineering contract is not progressing as planned, sensibly has decided to exempt affected businesses from paying commercial rates until the conclusion of the work, which now is scheduled for the end of May.
The municipal assembly of Olhão unanimously approved the proposal of the Council executive, which had suggested this temporary exemption with the objective of, "helping to alleviate the difficulties of those who carry out their economic activity."
The work is being executed alongside a temporary one-way system and has revealed an old sewer system that was found to be connected to the rainwater drainage network - responsible for some of the trademark sewage that daily flows into the Ria Formosa.
The work was contracted by Polis Litoral Ria Formosa Society, a company wound-up at the end of last year, with traders soon losing patience with the sporadic work ethic of the contractor.
The mayor of Olhão, António Miguel Pina, assures all that when the work is completed, "everyone will benefit from the new leisure space of this noble zone of the city," but this misses the point as yet another contract is visibly behind schedule and affecting those it aims to help.
The sub-contractor is CONDESP, already involved in civil engineering work in the city with the result that its labour force is overstretched – and certainly underpaid with some on just €3.35 an hour.
On 30 November, 2018, the liquidation commission of Polis entered into the €600,000 contract with CONDESP for the work on Avenida 5 de Outubro, with a deadline of 180 days.
The mayor has been blaming Polis for the delay in the works and has blamed the old and illegally connected sewage network for the contract slippage but the fault is in the contract as six months to dig up a road, replace any old pipes and resurface, is an over-generous time period.
Those concerned with Olhão’s heritage remain quietly relieved that the Council has concentrated on this 'restaurant road' rather than push through an earlier Council plan to ‘revitalise’ the historic centre with machine-cut slab paving, modern halogen lighting and stone blocks where wooden benches one stood.
The next stage for the city’s waterfront is the wholly unnecessary 'modernisation' of the mature and shady park, planted in the 1960s, located at the eastern end of the vegetable market. This unnecessary destruction, sensibly, is being left until late 2019, well after the local elections.
