Different community leaders from Pereira sent the newspaper their discontent with the different extensions that the execution and delivery of what the community requested through the participatory budget passes through. Several commented with little pleasure that the municipal administration told them to request the execution of footprint plates, to which they replied that this was the responsibility of the mayor’s office and that the budgets were for the projects that they had already passed.
It should be remembered that the Participatory Budget is a policy and management instrument, through which the regional and local authorities, as well as the organizations of the population duly represented, define together and through elections in which the resources are going to be directed. funds allocated for this process. These are public resources available to the different administrations for direct or permanent intervention.
Some of the community requests
It is well known that keeping everyone happy is very difficult, each side will speak from its point of view and more so in electoral times, when each action is taken to show actions or to point out failures. For this reason, they asked what kind of projects were pending in some neighborhoods and villages, for example: in Boston, the request was the construction of bathrooms in the sports arena, while the most important request for the inhabitants of the La Unidad neighborhood, It was the improvement of the Community Action booth, which by the way came out in a note in mid-January and until today’s sun it has not been executed.
It is obvious that the most urgent needs in rural areas are borne by the intervention of roads, but in Alegrías, for example, they believe that the kiosk (it serves as a social hall) is essential for community activities.
In this regard, Sandra Alzate explained: “They are holding meetings by communes, they told us that all the work in the booths starts in August, they need this to be light so that we go to the elections again in November, because we told them that we were not going to elections as long as they did not hand over what they had withheld from us. For 2022 and 2023 we are going to ask for home improvement, those two budgets add up to about 170 million.”
On the side of the Planning Secretariat
Jhonier Cardona, secretary of this department and consulted on the same subject, expressed that “the issue of the footprint plates was a suggestion that was made to them, but it is simply with the aim of obtaining the budget, because if they are going to be Doing infrastructure works, you know how difficult it is today to buy materials and all that, and more and more rise then as the contract is formalized and legalized, that means that they have less and less budget, because it is more expensive”.
If this data is removed from what Juan Pablo Gallo used in 2019, for the emergency of Portal de La Villa, $1,593 million and what the mayor Maya in 2020 and 2021 requested to return to attend the Pandemic, which was $2,100 million, the assigned was at $24,463 million and that executed at $21,800 million for a real execution of 89%.
Secretary Cardona believes that some forget that the city first experienced an emergency and calamity situation in 2019, with the Portal de La Villa, for which money from the Participatory Budget had to be used for the power that The National Government delivers, so that the ruler uses the resources it has, so we pass it on to 2020, but it was a year of a Pandemic just like 2021, there are the reasons for the delay.
Regarding the little time that this administration has left and the deliveries, Cardona replied: “we are going to try to leave as much as we can until 2022. And I insist that they forget that these procedures are very slow, because they need many views good. I as Planning cannot start buying materials, my duty is to transfer the resources to Infrastructure or to the indicated secretariat and they make the tenders to make investments in the provision of sports equipment, the acquisition of technology or the creation of micro-soccer and basketball courts ” .
Given
The next elections to select the Participatory Budget projects will take place in November.