The Autonomous Regional State is fat, tired, and highly lazy.
Wanting to imitate the old and inadequate machinery of the Portuguese state has been one of the biggest mistakes in our autonomy’s 50 years.
We have been dazzled by the grandeur of our autonomous procedures. There has been no parsimony in setting up our public administration to date, and we have created a small monster that eats up a huge slice of our resources.
Our revenues are no longer enough to pay for the running costs of our regional administration.
To date, no government has bothered to create a profound reform of the region’s public administration, which is trapped in a bureaucratic network of more than 20,000 employees and continues to expand unchecked.
In the property area, citizens have no idea what belongs to the region and how much we could get rid of because it is useless for performing regional state services.
Regarding rural property alone, the Azorean government manages 740 buildings spread across all the islands, some of which are essential to the region, while others are not needed at all.
And for urban buildings, do you know how many are owned by the region? Close to 4,000!
Amid this administrative debacle, the Regional Government will have to intervene sooner or later in another phenomenon: the number of leases each government department has spread across all the islands.
There are 80 urban buildings that the government leases in addition to the more than 4,000 it owns.
The amount of urban rent the region pays monthly to install so much administrative fat is inconceivable.
That’s more than 150,000 euros a month in urban rents, some of which are used to store books and documents or install repetitive services that could be in a single building owned by the Region.
A year or two’s rent could be enough to build a large building to house it all.
The most flagrant case is the Regional Budget and Treasury Directorate’s leasing contract for several floors in the Solmar building in Ponta Delgada.
It costs the region around 40,000 euros—the highest rent—for 10 floors of services that could have been built in a single building in less than two years with the rent!
With a little effort, in the same building to be built, the Directorate of Territorial Planning and Water Resources could also be installed, which occupies the 2nd floor of the CTT building in Ponta Delgada, with a rent of almost 8 thousand euros (double the amount paid for the rent of the Office of the Representation of the Azores in Brussels), the Regional Directorate of the Environment, in Ponta Delgada, which pays a rent of more than 4. 550 euros, the Secretary of State’s own office, in Ponta Delgada. 550 euros, the Secretary of the Environment’s own office, which occupies the 3rd floor of the CTT building, for around 4,500 euros, IRAE and CADA, which pay 4,000 euros at the Matriz in Ponta Delgada, or even the Regional Science and Technology Fund, which occupies 3 floors of a building in Ponta Delgada for 3,500 euros.
These are just a few examples of the dozens of rental contracts scattered around the islands, especially in S. Miguel, Terceira, Pico, and Faial.
There are two store leases in Lisbon, with rents exceeding 3,000 euros each.
Then, the network of RIAC stores was created without the slightest concern of installing them in buildings that are part of the region’s heritage. They even pay rents of around 3,000 euros, the same happening with warehouses for the Accounting and Treasury archives (3,360 euros in Angra) or even for a book archive of the Regional Directorate for Culture (1,500 euros).
This is just one small world in the vast administrative galaxy of our regional machine, where the words “saving” and “creating” synergies are not used very often.
The regional machine needs a vast revolution, but from what we can see, there doesn’t seem to be the courage for any reform that might upset comfort and even some vested interests.
Making the regional state even fatter will be half the battle for the monster to come to a standstill.
And when the monster comes to a standstill, so does the region.
It won’t be long now.

Osvaldo Cabral is the director of the newspaper Diário dos Açores.
November 2024

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers from the Azores to give the diaspora and those interested in the current Azores a sense of the significant opinions on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL)