The district command of the Algarve’s GNR police will be relocated from Faro to Loulé. The new GNR HQ will be built on a plot of land provided by Loulé council near the CDOS rescue command and the local state-owned heliport.
A protocol confirming the move was signed last Friday by Eduardo Cabrita, the Minister of Internal Administration, who explained that the reason was because the GNR do not have jurisdiction in Faro where the previous HQ was located.
“It does not make sense for the HQ to be sited in a town where the GNR do not have jurisdiction,” he told reporters.
Cabrita said that relocating to Loulé makes more sense as the GNR are the “policing force of the rural world”. He added that Loulé is also more centrally located than Faro.
Construction of the new building is estimated to cost around €10 million but there is no start date thus far.
The decision has caught Faro mayor Rogério Bacalhau by surprise and sparked a wave of outrage in the town.
“Everything I know about this matter is through the press. A few months ago, the Minister of Internal Administration called me – it was a very quick phone call, no longer than a minute – and told me that they were thinking about relocating the GNR headquarters in Faro and another in Lisbon, and we arranged to talk about it later, but we never talked about it again,” Bacalhau has told newspapers.
“All I know is that it is the district command that is being moved, the GNR station will remain here. I would like to have more information about this, but I don’t,” he told Correio da Manhã.
PSD Faro slams decision
Meantime, political group PSD Faro has written an open letter slamming the government’s decision.
“Faro is a victim of government decisions which are extremely damaging to the borough. Our status as capital (of the Algarve) is being undermined with the removal of the headquarters of important public entities,” the social democrats say.
“The GNR HQ is the latest example of this, taken away from Faro to be delivered to a bordering borough, with no kind of study or explanation that we know about to back the decision. Faro will become the only capital of a district to not be home to its GNR HQ.”
“Worst of all”, PSD Faro says, is that this was all done behind the backs of the Faro people without any attempt to find a solution with their help.
The party stresses that the INEM emergency services headquarters has also been moved out of Faro and it fears that the tendency may continue.
Thus, the social democrats call on the local delegations of other parties, “namely those that support the government”, to share their “indignation so that this injustice can be reversed”.
michael.bruxo@algarveresident.com
