the essential
Mayor of a small town in the Lot, Sylvie Ercoli is committed on a daily basis to her constituents, never giving up, as she has done throughout her life, despite the challenges.
His blue eyes and white teeth, his black face, covered in coal dust. This is the image that Sylvie Ercoli keeps of her father, Jean Urbaniak, who succeeded his father Stanislas and his uncle, who came from Poland, like so many others, to work deep in the mines of the Decazeville Basin. Both died from firedamp. “They were based in Gua, then in Vitarelle,” recalls the woman who is now retired and mayor of Lunan, a town located in the Lot, between Capdenac-le-Haut and Figeac.
Born in January 1961, she grew up in Livinhac-le-Haut where she went to school before joining Decazeville middle school and then high school where she studied for a baccalaureate in accounting. “I remember parties at the time at the Vitarelle,” she recalls with a certain nostalgia. It's a bit grim today. I find it hard to go back…”
After a break in Toulouse – “I wanted to study law but I quickly gave up” – she then began working at EDF in December 1980. First as a temporary worker in Figeac, then in Montauban, Toulouse, Rodez and back. in Figeac around the year 2000. And it is still at EDF that she will end her career, in 2021.
But she did not wait for retirement to commit to the service of her village of some six hundred and forty inhabitants, of which she has been mayor since 2009 after the resignation of the previous chief magistrate of whom she was already the deputy, in 2008.
A daily investment for Sylvie Ercoli, who does not count her hours. “ [Récemment]at 7 a.m., she explains, I was pushing barriers so that a bus could pass without driving on the fresh tar. And in the evening, until 8:30 p.m., I participated in a meeting with the academy inspector. »
“A recognition”
And if the days of the chosen one are long, the Aveyronnaise never complains. “For me, it’s recognition after a lot of battles. » Because life has not spared the sixty-year-old. “I arrived five years after my sister with Down syndrome. My mother didn't want me. She was taking a lot of medications. » Born with a facial malformation, the little girl spent six months in Rodez hospital.
Later, at seventeen, the young woman had to undergo an operation lasting seventeen hours, at the Rangueil hospital in Toulouse. “I spent three months eating liquids, I weighed thirty-eight kilos, I was very weak. I fell all the time. »
A fragile health which, rather than weakening it, seems to have given even more strength to Sylvie Ercoli, she who played rugby in Toulouse, who broke horses in the Lot, and parachuted with her husband, Stéphane , engineer in a large group, whom she married in 1993.
“He calls me a rough-haired fool,” she smiles. No doubt because of her stubbornness and her ability to endure, she who fell from her roof fifteen years ago, waiting until the next day to go to the emergency room where the doctors did not understand how she could still walk…
And if life has not given her any gifts – she had to take care of her sister Danielle, of whom she was the guardian, and of her mother Annie, of whom she was the guardian, while her adopted son, Pierre, is disabled – nothing does not seem to stop Sylvie Ercoli, her piercing blue gaze, marking her determination, who continues to commit, day after day, to her commune. “With the municipal team, we try to keep the village alive,” said the mayor of Lunan modestly.
