Viera compared the Municipality of Colonia with that of Artigas because “the information that some departmental councilors have received indicates that the number of overtime hours that the Municipality of Colonia pays is very high. In the next few days we are going to make a report with the vague responses that we have received from the mayor’s office itself,” he said in dialogue with EL ECO.
When the Judicial Fair ends, the candidate for mayor and current deputy will appeal to the courts, so that the mayor’s office is ordered to respond to the request for a report on the entry of particularly trusted personnel.
“Through Access to Public Information in March of last year I made the request to the mayor.” Every organism must respond within 20 days, but almost a year has already passed. Viera says he has no answer. “This is the second time I’ve done it, the previous one was a couple of years ago, they sent an illegible photocopy and the judge asked that the mayor send one that could be read.”
Conditioning of workers
According to complaints from workers, “the departmental government of the National Party perversely manipulates officials with the payment of overtime; They are obliged to open the committee or do what their directors order. If they do not obey, they do not receive payment for overtime.”
The salary of municipal workers “is very low, 30 thousand pesos, and for an official to achieve a fairly decent salary it depends on compensation or overtime assigned to them. Depending on how that official attends to what nationalist hierarchical members ask of him, he can charge 50 thousand pesos per month.”
The candidate for the Frente Amplio proposes that civil servants have “decent salaries. No more money would be spent, it would be equal for everyone, without needing to depend on the meanness of whoever is above them in the hierarchical scale. That’s why I say it’s perverse, a kind of negotiation where the National Party apparatus wins. “The workers are hostages to that situation.”
The municipality of Colonia “is the largest company in the department and should provide quality to its workers and families. We are interested in the workers and that the resources of the colonists are invested well and in the entire department, because there are forgotten cities.”
companies business
It went through the sifting that “direct hirings, some are even observed by the Court of Auditors. They are careful in some maneuvers, because they comply with the legal framework, but they use the extension of contracts to generate favoritism for certain companies. To the point that, if one looks at the electoral lists, the owners of the companies that the mayor hires are part of the lists of the National Party. It is not bad that they are on a list, the point is that we know how these lists work.”
The questions
Public organizations must make purchases through bidding or requesting prices. Why does the nationalist mayor always buy from the same shed and paint shop and not diversify into the four or five in the city where he spends? Why are vehicles always taken to the same mechanical workshop and not diversified? Why is the patch always awarded to the same company? Are the materials that companies use in the works controlled?”
A dubious award
Some complaints are even circulating on social networks that catch my attention. For example, at the end of December, a man who was a candidate for mayor for Juan Lacaze (Julio Medina) of the María de Lima sector, was awarded the concession of the inn and campsite of the Santa Ana spa and was passed as Guillermo Rodríguez’s mayoral candidate. The man himself announced first that he was a candidate for mayor for De Lima and now for Rodríguez. Did they buy a mayoral candidate by giving him the concession of a hostel? Facts like this speak about how the National Party is run in Cologne.”
“5 thousand votes and we won”
The Broad Front of Colonia is “confident” of winning the municipal elections. “The difference in the last elections was 10 thousand votes, we are 5 thousand votes away from winning the mayor of Colonia. The challenge is that those who voted for us in October and November vote for us in May. We would win not only the mayor’s office but also have an important group of municipalities. “We would have a fair government, close to the people, distributing resources throughout the department, because Colonia is not just the Historic Neighborhood.”
