With the mayor of Leiria Gonçalo Lopes already showing that he heartily disagrees with statements made earlier today by economy minister Miguel Castro Almeida, the neighbouring mayor of Marinha Grande has gone on air to say he has been “profoundly shocked” by what he interprets as an “inadmissible and unjust” reading of the situation.
As we reported earlier, Castro Almeida has admitted the process of getting money to private citizens whose homes were badly damaged in storms that battered the centre of the country last month “is not going well” – but he essentially blamed the slow ‘evaluation’ of requests at municipal level. “The government has done everything it can,” he said.
Mayor Paulo Vicente tells Rádio Observador that his municipality has not received a cent of financial support. “I have a borough that was devastated – and I still haven’t received a cent from the government!” His sense of outrage was clear (as has been Gonçalo Lopes’ almost since the moment Storm Kristin ripped through his municipality, leaving areas looking as if they were war zones).
Vicente, like Lopes has already done, pointed to the difficulties faced by municipalities handling the process of conceding funding for reconstruction – and urged Castro Almeida to “tell the truth!”
Far from the statements about 700 technicians provided by the government to help municipalities handle people’s requests for financial help, Vicente stressed that his council has currently just 10 people “dedicated to the verification of candidacies for support, before sending them to external technicians” who then, presumably, pass them to the CCDRs for payment, after their own ‘evaluations’.
Up until yesterday evening, Vicente said Marinha Grande had been presented with 2,595 candidacies – of which just seven have been given the green light. When one remembers that these candidacies are invariably for people who lost whole sections of their roofs, if not the whole roof; outbuildings, etc., the agony of this kind of delay becomes very clear.
Paulo Vicente told Rádio Observador that the process of evaluating people’s requests demands rigour – to avoid the kind of problems that happened after the killer fires of 2017 in Pedrógão Grande. “Responsible mayors do not want something like that to happen again,” he said.
Source: Observador
