Article published by José Alberto León Alonso in Diario de Avisos, on 04/06/14.
Finally, Italy eliminates the provinces, a reform that has been invoked in the republic for years. The Italian Senate has approved the abolition of the 73 provinces, which will mean saving 3,000 public positions who – according to the head of Government Matteo Renzi – “from now on will experience the excitement of going to work.” The law also represents the birth of ten metropolitan cities. The new organization of local entities foresees the possibility of mergers between municipalities to make them more effective, by optimizing and simplifying their services. Pending the elimination of provincial entities from the Constitution, the current powers of the provinces will pass to the regions and municipalities.
This issue once again highlights our own problems with local structure and the size of municipalities. The importance of size underlies one of the key concepts of economics: economies of scale. Economies of scale are said to exist when the cost of production of a product decreases with the number of units produced. If this same concept is applied to municipalities, if there are economies of scale in the provision of municipal services, the cost of providing them will reduce as they are provided to more people, so grouping municipalities into larger ones would be a sensible strategy to save costs. This is a process that has been carried out on multiple occasions in Europe, but not in Spain for more than two hundred years.
In the Canary Islands, most of the municipal areas, at least on the most mountainous islands, are delimited by ravines that were once almost insurmountable obstacles, and as a result we have 88 municipalities, of which 22 have less than 5,000 inhabitants, 40 between 5,001 and 20,000, 18 between 20,001 and 50,000, and only 8 more than 50,000 inhabitants. In 2012, Canary Island municipalities with a population of less than 5,000 inhabitants multiplied by two the average personnel expenditure per inhabitant of cities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants in the Canary Islands, municipalities between 5,000 and 20,000 inhabitants exceeded it by no less than 33% on average, and municipalities between 20,001 and 50,000 inhabitants by 25%. So the existence of economies of scale in municipal size seems evident. The reasonable thing would be to reduce the number of municipalities so that they gain size through merger processes that, in my opinion, could use the regions as unifiers. This would reduce the number of current municipalities throughout Spain from 8,112 to around 400, and in the Canary Islands from 88 to only 25, with 8 municipalities in Tenerife, 6 in Gran Canaria and 3 in Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and La Palma. In La Gomera and El Hierro the number of municipalities would be reduced to 1 and their respective Councils would assume municipal functions, promoting comprehensive management on those islands, and avoiding unnecessary duplication.
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From this grouping, it would result that none of the new Canarian municipalities would have less than 10,000 inhabitants, 5 would have between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants, 7 would have between 20,001 and 50,000, and between 50,001 and 100,000 inhabitants, and 5 would have more than 100,000 inhabitants. Savings would amount to around 500 million euros annually in the Canary Islands and more than 16 billion euros each year throughout Spain, and the quality and cost of municipal services would improve substantially by taking advantage of the economies of scale of a larger population to supply. Another benefit for the citizen would be that the new municipalities would be in charge of managing public transport within the current regions (33% of total trips), with substantial improvements for the citizen. Thus, for example, taxi fares would be urban on any route between Adeje and Arona, San Miguel and Granadilla, and between La Orotava and Puerto de la Cruz. Likewise, the “new” municipalities of more than 50,000 inhabitants should establish urban bus lines between the territories of the region, united in practice but separated by fictitious borders that prevent effective management.
Naturally, this reform has only one victim: the political caste that governs us and that has not lost any of its privileges during the crisis. A reform like the one proposed along these lines would reduce the number of councilors in Spain by 45,000 people. And to these we should add the trusted personnel that accompanies them, along with the legion of “plugged in” introduced as permanent work personnel. No less than a hundred thousand people (probably more, no one knows exactly) in completely useless and superfluous positions living at the expense of the taxpayer. But, as they say in Germany, “frogs will never vote for the drying up of the pond in which they live.” However, in Italy even the frogs seem to have had enough and have decided that some of their public officials begin to experience “the excitement of going to work.” Shall we follow his path?
