On January 17th, the Assembly of the Republic approved the desegregation of 135 parish unions. Of the 135 parish unions, 302 Parish Councils will be reborn, which will once again operate autonomously. Among them are our parishes of Conceição and Cabanas de Tavira, in the municipality of Tavira.
Conceição and Cabanas thus return to being autonomous parishes. Conceição once again has a municipal team to manage the town and its extensive area of barrocal and mountains and Cabanas once again has another municipal team focused on the sensitive problems of an eminently touristic territory, for which a very attentive look and a unique sensitivity are required. .
The Assembly of the Republic thus corrects an error made in 2013, when the troika encouraged the then Portuguese government to aggregate municipalities and parishes. As aggregating municipalities would be, due to the power of municipalities, a more difficult process to implement, the Portuguese government chose to annex not municipalities but only parishes, the weakest link in the country’s administrative organization system.
Former secretary of the parish of Conceição and former president of the parish of Cabanas de Tavira
A desagregação permite assim, restabelecer a proximidade entre os cidadãos e a sua Junta de Freguesia, bem como melhora a eficácia da gestão pública em função das necessidades e identidades da comunidade
The aggregation of parishes increasingly distanced citizens from spaces for political debate, as well as from their parish mayors, who often began to be located further away from the people and forced to manage a substantially larger territory. The historical, cultural and social identification of the communities was also damaged. Parishes are, by their nature, local authorities of proximity and support to the population, a nature contradicted by the forced annexation, imposed from above, of two or more parishes.
Disaggregation thus makes it possible to re-establish proximity between citizens and their Parish Council, as well as improving the effectiveness of public management based on the needs and identities of the community. The irrelevant increase in administrative costs that it may imply is naturally compensated by a fairer and more efficient distribution of resources, not to mention its greater gain: that of providing greater and closer citizen participation, which is to say, the deepening local democracy.
With regard specifically to the detachment of Conceição and Cabanas, the success achieved demonstrates that it is worth, in terms of civic intervention, fighting for what we believe is best for the development of our land and for the happiness of its people.
Long live Cabanas! Long live Conceição!
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