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The bench of councilors of the National Party sent a letter to the mayor Carolina Cosse to insist on the request for a meeting to explain the use of a US $ 70 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The whites question in the letter that the credit is framed in the urban sanitation program, but “the public announcements about the use of almost 70%” of the money refer to “a pilot garbage project.” That, according to the opposition, will have repercussions on “the postponement of sanitation works”From the sewer network.
Cosse requires a special majority of 21 votes in the Departmental Board to approve the use of the funds, so the nationalists will seek to negotiate changes with the mayor.
The white mayor Javier Barrios criticized that the IMM “Finance things of current use with a 25-year loan” and said that with that money should prioritize “take the neighborhood sanitation that are missing and not put it off for five more years ”. Barrios delivered the letter yesterday with the mayor Rafael Seijas on behalf of the nationalist bench.
“Most of it is for the purchase of trucks and containers; that is always bought with cash or with smaller loans, not with 25-year loans, ”Barrios told El País. “A truck pays for itself in five years in accounting terms. A container is burned the next day. In contrast, 25-year loans are generally for Infrastructure works; it can be a collector, it can be the sanitation of a neighborhood, but not for a pilot cleaning plan ”, he insisted.
Cosse initially promoted a loan of US $ 120 million but that was not approved by the national Executive Power, which intercedes with the IDB. In return, one was authorized for US $ 70 million.
The mayor argued that this led to cutting sanitation works. “We had to withdraw a large number of sanitation works that we were going to carry out and there were only three left,” Cosse said in September as reported by Radio Montecarlo. “We defended it to be US $ 120 million, because we put everything on the table, but by not having the approval we redefined. Those works were left for sanitation and we kept the vast majority of cleanliness, “he added.
The nationalists, for their part, claimed in their letter that “having to choose which aspects to cut from the desired budget,” the mayor “chose to maintain the cleaning project and remove the expansion in several poor neighborhoods of Montevideo.”
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