Faro council has no hope of getting its smart new bridge to Faro Island completed, having dithered and wasted so much time that the funding deadline became impossible to hit.
The council today announced with great pride that the Polis Ria Formosa Company already has ‘launched tenders for contracts’ for some car park work, cycle lanes and to upgrade the access to Faro beach, all of which will be finalised before the end of 2015 before Polis is wound up.
Faro council says the work will allow "the improvement of access and movement to the bathing areas and residences for many people of Faro Island, while catering for visitors in cars, ensuring the livelihood of traders, restaurateurs and hoteliers along Faro Beach.”
The new ‘access and movement’ will also help any lorries taking away the remains of islanders’ properties, destroyed by the Polis’ contractors as part of the clearing up of the area to make way for sand.
These two contracts are being promoted heavily as there will be no new bridge. Mayor Rogério Bacalhau said last November that he had run out of time as the free money that Faro council was hoping for under the 2007 to 2013 grants programme had to be used for project that could be completed before the end of 2015.
This is just the sort of failed project that Miguel Poiares Maduro, deputy Minister for Regional Development, referred to when launching the Portugal 2020 funding programme in Faro on Wednesday.
The Faro Island bridge project has been a textbook example of civic indecision, poor planning, planned overspend and the probability of associated backhanders, incongruous design proposals, financial waste of pre-project spending, a limited or highly biased Environmental Impact Assessment and a lack of facts and figures as to why there should be a new bridge and what volumes it should cater for.
See http://www.algarvedailynews.com/news/4811-portugal-has-wasted-community-money
Now the carpark work and intervention along the cramped island road system will of course happen right in the middle of the busiest tourist season the Algarve may ever witness – summer 2015.
Faro council says that it “accepts that there may be some disruption.”
As for the bridge, one of the key reasons that it needed replacing was the engineering assessment that it would soon be unsafe as it is badly aged. If it is in danger of collapse, it still needs repairing or replacing.
