Bill should leave possibility of mayor, deputy from different parties - Herrera

Labour MP José Herrera said yesterday that while the Labour Party agreed with the amendments proposed to the Local Councils Act, he felt the bill should have allowed the possibility of a council having a mayor and a deputy mayor from different political parties.

Dr Herrera said in parliament that the councils should, as far as possible, not be confrontational.

This bill, however, provided that the mayor and the deputy mayor would be the candidates which won the most votes respectively from the party which won a majority in the council.

In order for the councils not to be confrontational, he felt that the bill should have left open the possibility of the councillors agreeing among themselves on who should be deputy mayor so that the holder of that post could be an individual from a different party than the mayor, or an independent.

There was nothing wrong in having such arrangements in local councils. After all, even in Parliament, the deputy speaker was nominated by the opposition.

For one thing, this bill should not discourage independents from standing for local elections. One could include a proviso for the second placed candidate to be appointed deputy mayor if no agreement was reached between the councillors.

Dr Herrera said the main purpose of this bill was to strengthen democracy at the local level. But there was also an urgent need to improve the electoral system for the holding of national elections. Malta had a proportional representation system which, with all its defects, was still the best there was as the people chose both the parties and the candidates. The problem was in the delineation of the electoral boundaries and the way that influenced the strength of the parties in parliament. A party which had a substantial majority of votes should not end up with just a one seat majority in the House. The MLP in government was under-represented after the 1996 elections and the current government was over-represented.

That the government had not acted to remedy this situation through new talks with the opposition eroded its credibility.

As things stood, the MLP could never hope to get more than a one seat majority in the House.

Similarly, reforms were needed in the composition of the Local Councils' Association. It simply made no sense that although Labour councillors were in a majority across Malta, the MLP was in a minority in the association. If this anomaly persisted, the MLP would have no alternative but to leave the association.

Earlier in the debate, Carmelo Abela (MLP) noted that in terms of the bill, when no party won a majority in a council, the mayor would be the oldest candidate from the party with the highest number of votes. He suggested, instead, that the mayor should be the candidate with the highest number of votes from the party with the largest number of votes.

The councils, he said, were seeing their funding shrink in real terms because they were being given new responsibilities without commensurate increases in funding. And taxation had been increased.

The government, he said, needed to hold effective consultations with the councils on developments which affected them. For example, what consultation had there been with local councils in the southeast of Malta on plans for fish farms to be sited off that coast and about the waste treatment plant at Marsascala?

Mr Abela said that with the councils gradually taking over work that used to be carried out by government departments, an obvious question was what had happened to the civil servants who used to perform that work? Perhaps an audit should be carried out.

The Labour MP complained that the provisions of the Data Protection Act were being used as an excuse for local councils not to divulge certain information. It was important to define how far and in what manner certain data should be made available.

Furthermore, although not going so far as granting parliamentary immunity, mayors and councillors needed some sort of protection over what they said during council meetings, which were open to the public.

Mr Abela said the MLP was being innovative in advocating new functions for local councils, such as in sports and culture, so long as the councils were financially helped. Culture, especially, should be directed at both locals and tourists.

In education it was well known that some councils were helping to ease the illiteracy problem.

Mr Abela referred to the setting up of empowerment centres for young people last year and said local councils should be involved in such work as well. The government had said that the first seven centres had been set up on the basis of the local councils' commitment to young people. By that yardstick, one of the empowerment centres should have been set up at Zejtun, whose local council had a long track record of working with young people.

Turning to local wardens, Mr Abela said the wardens were failing in their aim of educating the people, and the imposition of fines was sometimes exaggerated, with tickets being issued even for very minor infringements. The wardens were focusing too much on traffic, when they needed to work more on the environment.

Mr Abela said the local councils needed to be taken on board by the government in the implementation of its environment policy, not least for the introduction of waste separation at source.