POLITICS-BRAZIL: There Won’t Be Enough Jails to Hold all the Mayors

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 12 2001 (IPS) - Debts that exceed the size of the entire city budget and a host of irregularities inherited from their predecessors have alarmed thousands of new mayors in Brazil, who fear the sanctions provided for by the law on “fiscal responsibility” in effect since May.

There will not be enough jails for everyone if the law is strictly enforced, warned the president of the National Front of Mayors of provincial capitals, Celio de Castro, who has governed the municipality of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the eastern state of Minas Gerais, since 1997.

The new law should be modified, or it will go the route of so many other laws and regulations that have remained little more than paper promises, said Castro, who is starting out the new four- year mandate he won in the October local elections.

Jan 1 marked the start of the terms of 5,559 mayors, 40 percent of whom were re-elected incumbents, as well as the beginning of a movement pressing for a reform of the fiscal responsibility law.

The central government’s economic authorities and parliamentarian leaders, on the other hand, are hoping the law will bring about a “revolution” in the public administration.

The National Confederation of Municipalities, which formally represents all of Brazil’s municipal governments, has organised seminars for the first quarter of the year on the new fiscal requirements. Other municipal associations are also pressuring Congress and President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to modify the law.

Planning Minister Martus Tavares, however, says the fiscal law will not be amended, and that the mayors have four years to adapt to “the new administrative culture.”

The law provides for prison sentences of up to four years for executive authorities who violate the strict rules and targets with which the central government aims to overhaul the public administration.

Complaints about the administrative and financial chaos left by outgoing mayors are standard fare among city authorities in Brazil. But this time around, the complaints are even louder than usual, due to the new threat posed by the law on fiscal responsibility.

It is no longer possible to leave a “balance to be paid” in the following year if funds have not been ensured ahead of time – an offence that will be punished even more heavily if the debts are left to the mayor’s successor. And the punishment will be even stiffer in the case of expenditure and debt that was not legally authorised.

Payroll spending must not exceed 60 percent of net revenue: 54 percent for the mayor’s office and six percent for the city council. Several mayors and city councils have begun trying to abide by the requirements, amidst the criticism of their predecessors and of the law itself.

Six hundred of the 940 city council personnel in Maceió, the capital of the northwestern state of Alagoas, were laid off by the president of the city council, Mauricio Quintela, in an attempt to bring payroll spending into line with the cap fixed by the law.

In Belem, meanwhile, the capital of the northern state of Pará, the city council announced the dismissal of 400 employees, after the Association of Functionaries itself denounced that more than one-third of the employees were paid salaries but did not work.

And more than 25 percent of municipalities in the southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro earmark more than 10 percent of their revenues to the city councils, above the legal limit of six percent, according to the General Accounting Office, in charge of overseeing municipal and state finances.

That proportion stands as high as 18 percent in the case of Macaé, a municipality that receives large revenues from oil production in the area.

The debts left behind by outgoing mayors could land them in jail for up to four years. For example, one former socialist mayor, Gilson Menezes, of Diadema, near Sao Paulo, ended his mandate without the funds needed to pay the equivalent of some 350,000 dollars for the construction of schools.

But the main focus of attention, due to its size and a series of corruption scandals that broke out last year, is Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city.

“Chaotic” was the word Mayor Marta Suplicy of the leftist Workers Party used to describe the situation she inherited from her predecessor Celso Pitta – including a short-term debt of 900 million dollars, garbage piling up in the streets and several city government entities paralysed by a lack of funds.

Other city governments, like the mayor’s offices in Magé, near Rio de Janeiro, and Itaperussu, in the south, have had to close their doors for two weeks due to the disappearance of things as basic as furniture, computers or accounting books, or while they awaited an initial audit.

Critics say the law on fiscal responsibility, although seen by almost everyone as necessary for improving public administration, is overly stringent, and overlooks the social demands of the people.

The application of the same rules to small towns and large cities will hurt the poorest municipalities, according to the Brazilian Institute of Municipal Administration, a non-profit institute that provides technical assistance to local governments.

The burden of the fiscal adjustment that the new mayors have four years to carry out in order to correct distortions that have built up over decades will fall on the shoulders of the people, who will suffer the impact of the cuts in social spending and the tax hikes, warned Raúl Velloso, a public accounting expert in Brasilia, the capital.