The Dude Goes into politics - Not all that glitters is gold...
by
, December 29, 2021 at 10:23 AM (16535 Views)
Last chapter can be found here.
Time for an update I guess. We are halfway our mandate (2,5 years) and despite the Corona, I think we are doing great... sort of. To begin with, I did say "despite the Corona", but maybe this is a bit premature: as a matter of facts, contagion is spreading again quite fast, so in few days that will be back to impact our work again .. that can't be helped anyways, so let's just not take that into account right now.
Backing to more "standard things", the last few weeks we have been doing a lot of stuff and many good news came in: first, after ages without being able to do that, we managed to get a public funding of a bit above 250k € for (ear the drums roll!) redoing the asphalt!! Yes I know that that does not sound so special, but it is indeed: Italy in general is having a serious problem with aging roads (which is a reflection of the general bad situation of our country, ATL compared to the past) and that is even more serious when it comes to small municipalities like we are (it's a matter of numbers, if you redo one km of roads in Rome you get to please thousands and thousands, if you do so in a village you might end have having zero people on that one km, so .. ).
Second, we managed to get some funds unlocked (pending like since 10 years) to be spent on one of the two Natural Monuments we have (the S. Susanna Spring) and that was a sound success since those funds (approx 75k) were used to do two very needed works: rebuild the old bridge crossing the river and installing a new (and safer, since the natural park is bordered by a road on one side) fence. I very much rejoice for those works, honestly, and I hope we will be able to do more of them soon.
Third, and this is really big for a small Municipality like ours, we managed to put our greedy hands on a public fund of more than 2M €, which is coming from the "reconstruction" funds determined by the government after the 2016-2017 earthquake that hit the center of Italy (our municipality is part of those 15 ones that have been considered to be hit by secondary damages.. honestly I think there's just one already old abandoned house that got damaged.. but hey you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, do you? ).. anyways, that's a lot of money for us and we could really do a lot of stuff with them: i.e. we already have some solid plans for expanding the touristic receptivity by building a fully equipped caravan parking (12 parking places) or another project to build up a multi-functional center in an area which has very little in it, with the double purpose of creating a place for people of different ages to hang up as well as cheering up an area that has been abandoned for too long.
And we have many other small projects going on..
Now, one would say that that looks amazing, and while it might look so to those outside of the actual managing group (and it does look so to most of the local population...) it's not really like that, I'll break it down for you since it's quite a lot of different reasons.
First, this is a very lucky period regarding the number of funds and their entity: in the past 10 years before we jumped in, there have been years with 0 € funded, and when they managed to get like 5 or 10 K, it was party time. There's a combination of a series of factors that lead to this favorable conjunction, the main one being, as I said above, the fact that our municipality has been included in that list of 15; close to that there's the fact that our area has been neglected for very long by the regional government and now they have remembered about us.. while this is linked mostly to long overdue regular maintenance jobs (see the redoing of the asphalt I mentioned above), it still feels special after 30 years without any real local work on infrastructures. Anyway, this is not going to last long, probably a couple of years more (I mean, the time to close the projects we have opened already).
Second, we don't program at all. Now, this is not entirely our fault, to be honest. The point is, most of public funds are given out with very short time to present your projects (sometimes we talk about less than one week, even for big projects), that's of course crazy, but not unjustified.. I mean, those who have to, will know about them in advance, and when the bid comes out, they already have all the stuff prompt to run for it. While this can't be helped, what we could do is to try to have at the least some draft projects ready in the drawer, to be quickly adapted when needed. I've been pushing for this for long, but it's not much of the liking of our employees, since of course is more work for them. Sadly, only one of my fellow administrators sees it like me, for the rest they are too scared of pissing off our beloved employees (remember what I said about the conflict of interest on chapter 10?). Anyways, because we are used to work like that, we are today very bad at programming in general, while we have become phenomenal at responding.. it's still something, but not the way I like to work, at all.
Third, since this is a golden period for funds, we have definitely involved ourselves into too many projects, that is. Enthusiasm helps a lot and we indeed had a good reserve of it, but it's not infinite and life is not just about being a public administrator, luckily. This is leading of course to various burnout issues, not with me since I know the drill and avoided to involve myself in too much stuff, but we have a few elements who are close to becoming mad or die of a hearth attack, whatever hits first. I don't like this situation at all and I tried to avoid it by warning the boss about, but I was told that we could not leave anything behind and that we had to chase all projects... I spare you of my hot comments, but now I can at the least say "I warned you, motherer", which while not really satisfactory, it's at the least deserved by him. I guess that if one has not experienced yet the event of a burnout, they can't really understand how dangerous it is: you can go from a fully working and operational cooperator to nothing at all in days, sometimes hours. The positive side is that at the least we seem that we are able to bring on with the most important projects, but I'm afraid that the worst has yet to come.
Fourth, there's a due distinction I need to make: one thing is saying "heyyyyy I got a funding!", another one is to actually manage to have the work it is supposed to finance to be done and delivered to the community. As of today we have like 3 and a half million € projects pending (included those 2M I mentioned above) and some of them are from like more than 5 years ago (previous administration of course) and overall we have managed to deliver "only" something about 400K (including the asphalts and the woks on the Natural monument). Here I'm referring exclusively to those kind of "public works" projects, not those small things like celebrations, festivals, etc, that we found every year with the same stack of projects (it's copy paste and change the dates, that is ); those are important as well, community-wise, but nothing with regards to long term development of the municipality (from the touristic point of view and with regards to basic and advanced infrastructures). The main reason why one has to postpone the making of a certain project (or that can even make it fail!) is bureaucracy of course (and its biblical times).. but bureaucracy it's not dumb without reason: there's always a good motive if something goes wrong with your stuff, usually because someone else has to get your share on your place.
And I will spare you again from my rants about how the "greater politics" keeps mingling with us and tries to squeeze the oil out of the stone, as we use to say here, because this is TWC and swearing is not really allowed