Velas Municipal Council has completely paid off its debt, the mayor of the municipality, Luís Silveira, revealed yesterday. In the last 12 years, between direct and indirect debt, municipal companies, and the association that owns the Escola Profissional de São Jorge, it has paid around 10 million euros.
“The municipality has paid off all the financing it had, even those that were internalized in the municipality’s accounts, which came from municipal companies,” said the mayor, speaking to DI.
When he arrived at the municipality of Velas in 2013, Luís Silveira found “a chaotic financial situation” and a city “on the verge of financial reorganization”, which would force an increase in taxes and cuts in social support.
“I had two municipal companies, Velas Futuro and Terras de Fajãs, completely bankrupt, a vocational school, of which the municipality is the majority shareholder, with a monstrous debt, which hadn’t paid salaries for six months, hadn’t paid scholarships to students, hadn’t paid suppliers for two years and hadn’t paid Social Security and the Tax Authority for more than two years. It was a very complex situation,” he recalled.

The debt was around 10 million euros, divided between the municipality, the São Jorge Island Development Association (ADISJ), which owns the vocational school, and the municipal companies, which have since been taken in-house.
The mayor, elected by the CDS-PP and serving his last term at the head of the Velas municipality, explained that with less revenue from the State Budget and no increase in taxes or fees, the solution was to reduce expenditures.
“You’d think it was the fairy godmother who touched the debt and it disappeared. No, the explanation is simple: the municipality and the vocational school had a much higher level of current expenditure than they should have had,” he said.
According to the mayor, the Escola Profissional das Velas, for example, had a daily deficit of 2,000 euros.
“The school had to be adapted to its reality, particularly in terms of staff. There were redundancies at the time, but the school’s expenditure and operation had to be readjusted to its real size,” he said.
This month, the municipality paid off its 10 million euro debt, but Luís Silveira assured it could maintain investment, strengthen social support, and reduce taxes.
“This rigorous management led us, with a sum of factors, to be able to pay off the debt, have investment and have a municipality that had a management balance to carry over from 2024 to 2025 in the order of almost 6 million euros,” he said.

In Diário Insular–José Lourenço, director-Armando Mendes, editor-in-chief.