On his last day in office, outgoing Chapala Mayor Joaquin Huerta convened the local media to present a detailed accounting of Chapala’s shattered finances.
Citing drastic rises in payroll costs and public debt between 2007 and 2012 as the root problems, he pointed to his immediate predecessors as the culprits for putting the municipality on the skids.
Expanding on the financial angle addressed in his September 14 Informe (government report), Huerta handed out a stack of statistical paperwork to back up his claims.
A graph showing the increase in payroll expenses indicates that the list of government employees receiving salaries and pensions jumped from 569 at the end of 2006 to a peak of 841 by the time he took office in October 2012.
The numbers translate into a hike from 2,741,168 to 5,292, 266 pesos in monthly expenditures, taking into account yearly pay raises for base scale workers. (Wages for elected and appointed officials – representing about 20 percent of payroll costs – have not increased in that time frame.)
Under Huerta, 90 workers have been cut from the payroll, saving the government more than 14.8 million pesos in annual outlay for salaries, plus an additional 3.3 million covering vacation pay and year-end aguinaldo bonuses.
In regard to the municipality’s debt burden, Huerta’s graph depicts an astonishing 766.76 percent increase during the 2007-2009 term of Gerardo Degollado, the brother of Chapala’s brand new chief executive.
In 2003 former mayor Alejandro Aguirre left a debt of 10.1 million pesos. The figure rose 28.46 percent to just over 13 million under Arturo Gutierrez (2004-2006). Degollado followed, skyrocketing the amount to 99.8 million and Jesus Cabrera (2010-2012) pushed the total up another 38.7 per cent to 138.5 million.
Huerta stressed that through fiscal discipline and severe belt-tightening measures, his administration managed to chip 27.6 percent of off the debt, leaving just shy of 100.3 million in the red column for the in-coming government. He also championed a debt refinancing deal aimed at slashing interest payments that, while not yet signed, sealed and delivered, will likely come to fruition under his successor.
Delving into the slew of labor suits that were dumped in his lap, Huerta said his administration shelled out 5.6 million pesos to settle 19 judgments handed down against city hall. Payments due for an additional 34 cases, attributed to “irresponsible” handling by either Degollado or Cabrera, are still pending. And 25 another cases are still being processed for resolution by the labor tribunal.
Huerta likewise referred to three concessions for public services he qualified as harmful to the government’s interests.
The contract for disposal of solid wastes, forged under Degollado’s watch, costs close to a half million pesos every month. Separate deals for the private operation of downtown parking meters and street lighting fixtures, cooked up by the Cabrera government and challenged by Huerta’s legal department, are currently tied up in the court system.
Huerta boasts that his administration shied away from all transactions of similar nature.