An 'Office of Local Entrepreneurship' has been created by Silves council and it opens on the 18th of November.
"This new service aims to create an enabling economic environment for business activities in the county, to have a targeted approach for quick responses to the needs of entrepreneurs, businesses and investors in various areas, including information advice and monitoring related to national and Community funds," read the council statement.
According to the municipality, the new office seeks to 'promote individual relationships with entrepreneurs and investors, to provide all the information on all available support, and to promote contact with public or private institutions so as to support local producers in boosting their activities.'
The staff running this bureau will be able 'to advise on the current legislation, criteria and procedures to access EU and other funding programmes.'
The bureau's birth happily coincides with Portugal 2020 which sees €270 million made available in EC grants to businesses across the nation, but only 7% allocated to the Algarve.
Silves has a deserved reputation as being one of the Algarve's least helpful councils when it comes to those wishing to establish businesses within the council area.
The new Silves bureau seems from the information received today to concentrate on advising people on how to access grants and free money from those institutions willing to send it.
It also would be of inestimable benefit for the council to set up a one stop bureau to sort out the interminable bureaucratic delays and deliberate tangles that this council traditionally has deployed to thwart and frustrate those willing to set up and run businesses in the Silves area. This is the reality, more grants are only part of the answer.
Comments
I was repeatedly told "Next week" so I returned week after week after week after month after month, to no avail.
When I explained that I'm not waiting to open my bar because they could not get their act together, they just shrugged, the usual response. I got a visit from the big wigs at the council the week my bar opened asking for my licenses, I produced all the ones I managed to get but a few were still missing. They had the nerve to say I couldn't open without them, I said why should I go out of business because you can't do your job?
2 years later I went out of business and I still hadn't got all my licenses from Silves Camera after repeated monthly visits to them!
The point is to get the maximum return for the minimum spend. Consider how often 'new motorways' at great expense run alongside the old A roads. Or never get completed.
Individual Municipals waste huge sums on grandiose projects to show off individually rather than combining with other Municipals and dividing the projects.
Another simple example would be tourism. Not just throwing a million or two at a wealthy landowners mansion with 10 beds on the assumption he will follow through and open it to the public for tourism. And if he does for how long and at an accessible price ?
Common sense suggests that say 10 establishments could have 100,000 to get legal and licensed. Each adding say 4 beds at a more popular segment.
So the list goes on. No regulation, no control. Just total waste. And burla, trafficacao influencia, peculato etc etc
So Brussels keeps paying ! As does the UK to this nonsense ...
One of the sadder aspects of how 'morally bankrupt' Portugal's decision makers are - and therefore how they so fail the European Union - is how these grants are actually seen as 'theirs'.
Anyone who has been on an application list for EU funds, been told by the municipal list keeper with a giggle that they have '3 of their own family projects also applying for funding'. Later requested for hundreds of euros to stay on the list of applications for EU business start-up funding.
On querying this extra payment - 'mysteriously' dropped from the applications. Gutting! And no investigation as there is nothing at fault at the Portuguese end.
Discovering later that you are British ... that is the fault !
The grants are also seen as a splendid gravy train so everyone involved, municipal and regional officers, lawyers, architects, builders, equipment suppliers insists on idiotically high payments. Even to prepare the bid. Part cash.
Knowing that johnny foreigner will be paying around 40% of their bill, if the municipal ever licence it .... so the 60% undeclared is theirs !
The delays, deliberate misinformation, one department not knowing what the other is doing, its procedures and total inbred lack of desire (not ability) to help is born no doubt from years of Isabel Soares' regime where actually to take a decison was a sacking offence under her twisted and corrupt regime.
As you say Ed, this new office is just to get more grant money in, when what is needed is an enema for a blocked system for projects, licenses and plans that lie in petty officals' bottom drawers.