Municipal body ‘with no political power’ raises more questions than answers

Although the idea of establishing a municipal body without political power is not new, it has regained prominence after the Secretary for Administration and Justice, Sonia Chan, said this month that a public consultation on the matter would take place this year.
Chan admitted that the creation of such a municipal body might lead to the termination of the current Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau (IACM), and guaranteed that IACM staff would not come off badly from the expected major restructuring.
Chan previously said that the creation of the municipal body was allowed within the ambit of the Macau Basic Law.
In order to learn about both consequences and potential benefits of the creation of such a municipal body, the Times spoke with José Luís Sales Marques, the last president of Leal Senado (City Hall) between 1993 and 2001. That was when the Senado was abolished and lead to the creation of the current IACM.
Sales Marques said that knowing which department or body would work in a better way is the most difficult issue to resolve since “it is difficult to evaluate something [that I don’t know the form of yet],” he said.
Besides the uncertainty and the incapacity to judge the relative pros and cons of the possible abolition of the IACM, Sales Marques mentioned that the first issue to consider when creating the future municipal body is related to the competencies of such a body, “I don’t know exactly if those competencies are the same as the IACM has for the time being [or] if new ones will be added,” Sales Marques said. “What matters is that the bodies that will be defined will have to have an effective decision-making power and that they would take these decision on the matters they have competence to handle.”
Sales Marques further added that “the decision-making bodies need to be able to reflect in a dynamic way Macau’s pulse because these bodies will make decisions in order to solve problems directly related to the wellbeing of the population and in order to raise citizens’ quality of life.”

In this way, Sales Marques highlights the need for clarification around these decisions.
“Will it be a department adapted from IACM? Will it be a brand new department? This is something that needs to be clarified in order to grant its efficiency,” he said.
“Municipal management is a facilities’ management,” Sales Marques noted, saying that the new body needs to be able to do “close-to-people management.”
Questioned by the Times on the meaning of the future municipal power without political power, the current president of IACM, José Tavares, admitted, “I also don’t know yet what it means, we need to wait for the public consultation that will be done [before] the year end as Secretary Chan said.”
“How [it] is going to work, I don’t know [that] either,” said Tavares, adding, “the only thing that was promised is that nobody will lose their job because of this [announced restructuring of IACM] and that’s obviously a good sign.”
Although he said that he is not yet aware of the consequences of the creation of the municipal body, the president of IACM thinks what is on the line is “maybe a change in a little bit of the structure, the name or of some member composition,” he suggested, reaffirming that “at the time of the public consultation, people should be more informed in order to have an opinion.”
For now, the issue of the future municipal body seems to raise more doubts than answers. According to the opinions heard by the Times, it will be clearer when an actual proposal for the creation of the municipal body without political powers is officially presented to the public and enters into public consultation before the end of 2016.

MOP2.6 billion budget in 2016

According to information made available by the IACM to the Times, IACM currently employs 2,630 staff members, a reduced number due to the transfer of some of its functions and staff members to other governmental departments (around 270). The IACM also informed the Times that due to the transfer of some functions the department’s budget was also reduced by around MOP373 million from the original MOP2.6 billion in 2016 (which was largely unchanged from 2015, compared to 2.4 billion in 2014). IACM did not respond to other questions posed by the Times, namely if the creation of the new municipal body would lead to changes in the number of staff.