The eagerly awaited Portimão council budget for 2014 will focus on strengthening social support, if new leader Isilda Gomes gets her way.
"The Municipal Emergency network must respond to the neediest people. Forty years after the 25th of April we can not have people starving again," said Gomes, explaining that strengthening the budget for the social sector is still under detailed examination, “everything will have to be analyzed, all the pros and cons."
Social support is what Gomes wants for the people but these plans still have to be "discussed, worked on, checked and then approved at a full meeting of the council. The final decisions are made by a collective of seven people and then it gets voted on in the municipal assembly."
Until Gomes was voted in this September, Portimão council held the unenviable crown of being the worst run in the country, using its impressive debt level as a yardstick, and the council's financial rescue is still being delayed as it waits for approval of a huge loan from government.
Gomes says the city especially need tidying up after years of neglect despite tens of millions of euros flowing into, and quickly out of the council’s bank accounts. The streets need repairing and the gardens need rescuing. In fact the city is a mess both financially and aesthetically as the previous regime was unable to offer any credible direction or plan to bring the accounts under control and to make the city a desirable one to visit and work in.
The government rescue deal is being mulled over by the Court of Auditors but it is not thought that there will be a problem. There will be a problem if the government decides not to grant the council its rescue money as the behaviour of the previous administration, where arrests have been made for corruption and missing money at council controlled Portimao Urbis, left the accounts in tatters.
In the meantime Isilda Gomes says "we have a clear understanding of our limitations with the little money we have available, over and above the money we need for wages, for permanent and mandatory spending, and for payments to the State. All this obviously eats into a large part of any budget but people realise perfectly well that this is not a time of plenty, so we have to be rigorous and transparent in the spending that we do carry out."
The external audit that Gomes requested on taking on the mayorship is pending and should help to clarify the financial habits of a previous regime whose investment strategy involved wasting an inordinate amount of ratepayers’ money, bleeding local businesses for more and bleating when it run out.
