Thursday, December 19, the last meeting of the Municipal Council of the year in Saint-Paul-lès-Dax had as its main ingredient the adoption of the initial budget. However, the session was peppered with “responses from the shepherd to the shepherdess”.
A few days after the previous session, in fact, the elected opposition member and vice-president of the Greater Dax agglomeration, Catherine Raba, had a letter distributed in the mailboxes of Saint-Paul-lès-Dax. information entitled “The Action of Grand Dax in the service of the Saint-Paulois”.
The initiative triggered the indignation of the mayor, Julien Bazus, who insisted on speaking out against it, specifying that “it is false to write that regarding the roads, Saint-Paul refused to increase its financial participation. Since the start of the mandate, we have said that we wanted to put an additional 320,000 euros into our roads. The real question is why you and your colleagues refuse to allow Saint-Paul town hall to put more money into roads. You prefer the common pot of the Agglo (in other words to participate in the Clect, local Commission for the evaluation of transferred charges). You are proposing that we put 650 million euros into a common pot that goes everywhere in the Agglomeration, without any work being carried out in Saint-Paul for four years. The City's proposal is to call on competition funds, as is done everywhere in France. Why do you refuse this? »
“Tour de force”
And, he adds: “Why do you write anything in a document that wants to have an official character, in particular concerning the cycle path which would be financed by the Greater Dax Agglomeration. It's true, but at 44%. The other 66 percent are financed by the State, the Region and the Department. »
Response from the vice-president, who defends herself by speaking of “a tour de force of playing political politics to digress” and of “regretting that the project for the future Toumalin gymnasium appears on the town hall's greetings card while “It won't come out of the ground before 2026.”
Christian Berthoux then intervened, asking “that this pre-election ping-pong stop to return to the budget. »
Budget: continuity and adaptation
In the absence of a finance law, it is hypothetical to consolidate a draft budget. That of Saint-Paul-lès-Dax, which was validated with nine votes against, will be around 30 million euros, with almost 19 million in operation, including 58% in personnel costs and a little more than 11 million in investment. . “A primitive budget,” explained the commune’s chief financier, Jean Lavielle, “which in a tense context allows us to control expenses and maintain the direction of services for Saint-Paul residents. » According to Dominique Romain, it is “an end-of-term budget which gives pride of place to investments and which could have limited the expenditure of the PUP (Urban Partnership Project) of Terrasses du Lac and which could have provided for dredging of the lake. » Christine Girodet for her part “welcomed the start of major campaign projects and regretted the political tensions with Grand Dax, which explain its lack of financial support in the soft road project. »
