With the majority of Together, the Deliberative Council of La Plata discussed and approved this Thursday the 2022 Accountability in the middle of a strong debate with the opposition that denounced under-execution of almost 6 billion pesos and cuts in sensitive areas of the Municipality.
The file, which arrived at the premises with the office of the majority of the Treasury Commission, He was sanctioned with the 14 votes in favor of the Juntos bloc. The 10 councilors of the Frente de Todos, meanwhile, rejected the surrender of the Executive and presented a minority office in which they denounced that there was an under-execution of the resources of almost 6 billion and cuts in key areas such as Health, Public Works, and Community Development.
The defense of the project sent by the Executive was in charge of the president of the Treasury commission, Carla Fernandezwho began his presentation by criticizing the high levels of national inflation in 2022, which ended at 95%, which made the executed budget very different from the projected one, which had taken the 60% inflation guideline included in the national budget as a parameter. .
“I started to look at the inflation of other countries and I found that countries like Bolivia or Brazil had the same inflation in a year that we have in a month. This is definitely not normal and shows that the government cannot control the inflation and this generated greater expenditures,” he said before detailing that a total of 34 billion pesos“with large expenditures in terms of infrastructure works and improvements in public space, as well as the allocation of resources in key areas such as security, health and education.”
In his presentation, Fernández also reviewed the numbers of the execution secretariat by secretariat and highlighted the investment made in Health, Government, Culture, Public Spaces, Security and Justice, Public Works and Community Development. He valued the LED lights plan, the “Veredas a la obra” program, the execution of key works such as the widening of 66 Avenue, 38 Avenue, 31 Avenue and 467 Street from Route 36 to Camino Belgrano, and Los Hornos water reservoir. He also mentioned the opening of the three new Community Integration Centers in Altos de San Lorenzo, El Rincón and Melchor Romero.
The president of the Frente de Todos bloc, She had Lamberti, was the one who opened the round of exhibitions for the opposition. He complained about the lack of responses from the municipal secretaries to the consultations carried out in the Finance Commission and criticized the fact that 17% of the budget was not used last year. He assured that these resources could have been used to build “60 km of streets with a ditch cordon or to double the number of health centers or to make a housing plan.” “Could it be that the mayor does not know the needs of the city that has the luxury of not using that money?” Lamberti ironized.
He also pointed out that these funds were not allocated to the salaries of municipal workers who “are well below the poverty line.” And he wondered what will happen to those resources that were not used: “It is not going to be that these funds are used in the election year because it pays better or in advertising, which increased a thousand percent. It seems that the mayor’s needs are advertising and propaganda,” he said.
“The big losers are always Health, Community Development and Public Works, and yet the modifications that were made to adjust to inflation were in Planning, the General Secretariat, the Neighborhood Communication Secretariat, the great beneficiaries of the budget. How Can it be? This surrender puts the mayor’s priorities on the table again,” he closed.
The councilor of the FdT, William Face, He assured that the surrender “is a fright” and “an outrage by the ruling party and the mayor” Julio Garro. “It is striking that Garro is in his seventh rendering of accounts and has never expressed an opinion on the subject. He never talks about what he does with the resources of the neighbors,” he said. He also assured that each surrender generates “deja vu” since the same problems recur year after year. “I think that if it were not for party loyalty, some councilors of the ruling party would be voting against this surrender,” he shot, considering that the more than 5 billion that were not used “are a loss for the community” and that “it is bestial”.
Cara also questioned that the percentage of municipal collection falls year by year and that the Municipality depends more and more on provincial resources. “How much did the vaccination calendar fall? Can anyone here say that the Primary Health Care Centers would not have needed the resources that were not used?” He asked his peers from the ruling party. “They are working very badly with the resources of the neighbors,” she declared.
In turn, the councilor Paula Lambertini He maintained that it is “the worst accountability of the management” of Garro and maintained that there is a correlation in other municipalities governed by Juntos such as Lanús. “This, far from being a surplus, is under-execution. We should be ashamed. Six billion pesos is the equivalent of 600 blocks of asphalt,” he said, and depicted it with photos of the unpaved streets of the city in San Carlos, Villa Elisa and other neighborhoods of the city.
He also criticized the collection policies of the municipality and explained that the SUM rate “has a collection rate of 60%: they always pay the same. There is no policy to penalize defaulters. I sense that neighbors have a hard time paying it because they don’t see that be rewarded in better services”, he stated. He also questioned the way in which the resources of the Educational Fund were executed and sought to show the double discourse of the ruling party since only 50% of what had been budgeted for road safety was spent. “We can say on TV that we are interested in order, but what is real is that the city is ugly, dirty, insecure, increasingly unequal, with serious problems in promoting production and work,” he summarized.
For Together, the councilor Lucia Barbier He defended the work carried out by the municipal team in the economic context and detailed how inflation and exchange rate variations affected the 2022 budget executed by Garro and forced, for example, to redeterminate prices in public works. “It seems that they are unaware of what happened in Argentina in 2022, I understand that it is a political position of the Frente de Toddos to reject the budgets and accountability,” he said. And he retorted to the opposition that the provincial government did not pay a single peso for the Capital Tax and that the resources that the Nation transferred were 1% of the total. “I don’t care who puts up the money because the money belongs to the people of La Plata but, in 2022, the Nation turned 291 pesos for each inhabitant, it is the number of shame,” he explained.
the aedile Juan Martinez GarmendiaFor his part, he asked the opposition to “remember” and reminded them of the inheritance that Garro received when he took office in the municipality in 2015. He maintained that the city “was yellow” and that the streets “were broken”, to value the plan of LED lights and the paved paved blocks. “Do you remember the state of the most important cultural centers in the city: the Dardo Rocha passage, the Republic of Children, the Lake Theater?”, he retorted and also pointed out that the security camera monitoring center that it worked diagonally 74 “it was embarrassing”.
At the close of the debate, the councilor Lucas Lascours sought to contrast the abandonment that the FdT had denounced and detailed some of the works carried out by the Municipality such as “the asphalt of 146, 149 from 68 to 72 and from 52 to 58; 72 to 149, and 161 “. And he chicaned them: “I would tell them to try to change the story because they are boring and because the neighbors do not believe them. You make up a room and the theater is completely deteriorated, while others do works that are valued by the neighbors who accompany us in all the elections In the next 4 years, Mayor Julio César Garro will continue to transform the city and the residents will continue to accompany him”.
