President of AMUCH defends the gas voucher formula: It is a concrete solution for today and not for 3 years later

While more than 150 municipalities in the country involved in the “popular gas” project seek to move forward with their project to distribute liquefied gas at a lower price, other concrete ideas have emerged, and more feasible to be implemented in the short term, considering the objections raised by the Comptroller to the sale of municipal gas.

That is the case of the initiative proposed by the Association of Municipalities of Chile (AMUCH), which groups more than 80 headed mainly by right-wing councilors, who propose to deliver a discount voucher or voucher for the purchase of gas cylinders.

“We hope that in the next few days” we can begin to deliver discount vouchers for gas, “said Gustavo Alessandri, president of AMUCH Chile in an interview with The Counter at La Clave.

In fact, the municipalities of this organization met on Tuesday with the Minister of Energy, Juan Carlos Jobet, to implement the initiative, which seeks to benefit the most vulnerable 70% of the country.

The mayor of Zapallar stressed that with these discount vouchers for gas, “we want to reach the neighbors who are having a hard time with a concrete and precise solution.”

“Today we are talking about a problem, but we have come to solve it today and not 3 years later (…) we want to avoid all the state bureaucracy that is a long solution,” said the mayor, defending this delivery of discount vouchers over the popular gas sales formula promoted by his colleagues and which received the opposite opinion in the Comptroller’s Office.

“We are experiencing inflation, more and more people are knocking on the door and the issue of gas came up. But between waiting after a contrary opinion from the Comptroller’s Office, a change of the law that will take several months, we decided to look at the AMUCH for something practical and in a reasonable time ”, he added.

The communal chief reported that a successful pilot has already been carried out in La Reina, and now AMUCH will implement an agreement with the distribution companies -Lipigas, Gasco and Abastible- to make discounts on their purchases to the neighbors who will be in a database prepared by each municipality.

To do this, the beneficiaries must not meet any requirement other than being a resident of the commune associated with AMUCH, he said.

“In La Reina we were talking about discounts of 15% to 40%, in balls of 11, 15 and 45 kilos, we are talking about a range of possibilities for residents,” he said.