The CCDRs will receive competences from Education, Health, Formation, Forest, Culture and Tourism, phased.
The Government wants the second phase of the decentralization process – which implies the transfer of competences from dozens of regional directorates to the Coordination and Regional Development Commissions (CCDR) – be finished until 2024.
According to the News Journal, the Ministry of Cohesion foresees the extinction of regional directorates in areas such as Health, Education, Culture or Tourism, phased, but with the commitment to be up to 2024. Employees of extinct organizations move to CCDR, but the leading positions disappear.
After the first phase of decentralization, aimed at strengthening the powers of municipal councils, followed by an increase in the powers of the CCDR, foreseen since the first government of António Costa.
Ana Abrunhosa admitted, during a parliamentary hearing, It will be a “painful” process., justifying that “structures will disappear” and “many national agencies will also lose competences and power”. “This is what decentralization and regionalization means”, He stressed.
The explanatory note of the parliamentary hearing, cited by JN, anticipates that this is a “very ambitious” process and that the Government intends to carry it out “by the end of the year 2023”, which will be done gradually and that “until 2024 all the competences of the aforementioned services and bodies are considered transferred”.
Aníbal Reis Costa, Vice-President of the Alentejo Regional Coordination and Development Commission, in his Radio Pax commentary entitled “Everyone wins with the transfer of skills”, defends the government's decision.
In the broader scope in which I find myself now, we envisage the transfer of powers from the Central Administration to the CCDR (which may soon have a new legal status) as something fundamental for the good management of the entity and as very relevant for the articulation of public policies in the region, that you need so much. What is expected here will be, resulting from negotiations and new functional definitions of deconcentrated State services, provide the CCDR with “regional executive” powers that could constitute the true beginning of the country's administrative regionalization.
for these reasons, I am a convinced decentralizer, aware of the organizational and political need that Public Administration has to meet efficiency requirements, respecting the reality closest to people, and truly “responsible” (from English accountable) before electorates and populations that, rightfully, choose the path they want for their land and region.
