The president of the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP) defended this Saturday extraordinary measures to support municipalities, so that the impact of inflation and increases in the cost of energy do not unbalance municipal accounts.
At the opening session of the National Meeting of Mayors, in Viseu, Luísa Salgueiro said that the impacts that the increase in inflation and the cost of energy have caused in the accounts, “are such that they demand and recommend that the Government also adopt extraordinary measures for the counties”.
The mayor of Matosinhos said that in the State Budget for 2023, the Government “will have to go further to ensure that local authorities can fulfill their powers, old, traditional and new, keeping the accounts in order.” .
“It is important, and we will tell the Government, the role of defending people, who put it first, and companies is decisive, but it is also time to deal with the municipalities,” stressed the president of the ANMP, emphasizing the difficulties that municipalities have the sense to respond to all situations.
Luísa Salgueiro also mentioned the new conditions for the municipalities resulting from the new regime of extraordinary price revisions “and that the impact of inflation on the price of raw materials was not accommodated by the companies.
“Special legislation was published so that we can carry out extraordinary price revisions, but the municipalities have to pay and what happens is that many times this impact is not accommodated, and once again the country does not respond in a homogeneous way, in which the smallest municipalities have enormous difficulties in ensuring the balance of their budgets”, he warned. The president of the ANMP stressed that the mayors do not stop “demanding all the conditions” so that, now attending to the situation of the companies, it is also guaranteed that “the municipalities will not see their situation unbalanced by virtue of this extraordinary regime”.
Regarding the ongoing decentralization process, which will be the subject of a panel during the afternoon, to discuss the situation and debate, Luísa Salgueiro said that the ANMP is advancing so that “there are no setbacks and that the municipalities are not penalized in their accounts.” in this step”.
“At this stage, the focus we have is to ensure that the accounts are balanced and that the agreement that we made at the end of June and that will now have repercussions on the State Budget and our municipal budgets, is profoundly different from the rules that were previously and guarantee that, in the different sectors, this balance is guaranteed”, he said. Stressing that the process is not complete and there are “many problems to be resolved,” the leader added that this month and October will be the period dedicated to closing a new agreement in the social area.
The National Meeting of Mayors takes place throughout the day in Viseu, with local management and financing and the decentralization of powers on the agenda. The Minister of Territorial Cohesion, Ana Abrunhosa, Ana Abrunhosa, chairs the closing session, scheduled for 6:00 p.m.
Source: Observadora
