We know his famous Atlas or his portraits of the intercommunalities of southern Lorraine with statistics that make reference. But Scalen, heir to the urban planning and economic development agency of Greater Nancy, is above all an agency which carries out expertise and cutting-edge studies for local authorities in areas such as town planning, economic development, education, health… It is also an exchange platform for decision-makers from all over southern Lorraine and even from the Meuse and Vosges.
This means that Scalen, with its budget of 3.8 M € and more than 40 employees, experts in their field, weighs heavily in the definition of local authorities’ strategies. And it is a new president who has just taken his head, namely the mayor of Malzéville Bertrand Kling, elected a few days ago. He succeeds Chaynesse Khirouni who, propelled to the head of the departmental council last July, will have made a rapid passage there.
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Assigned missions
Bertrand Kling, vice-president of the metropolis but also president of a structure like the territorial establishment of the Meurthe and Madon basin which fights among others against floods, has the experience of cooperation between communities. He not only intends to give specific missions to his vice-presidents (Valérie Debord, vice-president of the region, Michel Breuille, the mayor of Essey) but he also appointed a third, namely Chloé Blandin, elected in Nancy . “My goal is to have a fourth vice-president who could come from the Vosges,” he said. It will not cost the agency anything since these functions are not remunerated!
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Conversion of wasteland
In fact, it is a question of fully exploiting an agency considered as a resource of gray matter because “the stakes are major for our territories”, estimates Bertrand Kling. “There is of course the energy and ecological transition. But we can clearly see that on the mobility front, for example, there is a real fracture in rail matters ”.
At the heart of the matter: connections to the south, to the capital… Demography is also a challenge. Because it is the vitality of a territory. However, changes in society and in behavior also have direct consequences on housing, for example. “When we build a thousand homes, seven hundred are consumed by phenomena such as family reorganizations, the emergence of single-parent families…”. We must therefore build to attract and at the same time stop the artificialization of soils. This raises, among other things, the question of reconversions of wasteland.
In all of these areas, Scalen and its new president have their work cut out for them.
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