Sandoval noted that last year his government signed an agreement with UNOPS, the operational arm of the United Nations, to ensure maximum transparency in all of its acquisitions.
“We are determined to end any kind of influence (peddling),” he told an assembled audience of politicians, civil servants, businessmen, consular officers and representatives of NGOs gathered in the original, ornate congressional chamber in the Jalisco Government Palace.
Sandoval spoke of the advances made in modernizing Guadalajara’s antiquated and much criticized transportation network. He called the investment in the city’s third light train (subway) line “historic” and said that “a modern Guadalajara requires modern transportation.”
Sandoval announced that this month companies would be allowed to bid to operate the long-awaited prepaid card system for the metro-area bus and light train network. Owners and drivers have consistently blocked the move but time, it now appears, has run out for them.
The governor admitted that the general public does not buy into the notion that crime has abated during his two-year tenure. However, he provided generalized figures that sought to substantiate this: kidnapping down 64 percent, bank robberies 57 percent, rape 20 percent, murder 17 percent, muggings 64 percent, burglaries of businesses 15 percent.
Sandoval also reiterated his backing for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s plan for states to take control of municipal policing, as well as his determination to weed out corrupt cops.
Better than expected job creation – 66,000 in 2014 – was another feather in his administration’s cap, he noted, while lauding his program to provide free transportation and school supplies for more than a million students.
Sandoval also gave a call out to his administration’s efforts to reduce poverty in the state, citing statistics showing that around 100,000 people who were living without basic services now count on potable water, drainage, electricity and decent housing.
Over the next two years, Sandoval said his government intends to spend around 435 million pesos on improving basic services and nutrition in economically challenged parts of the state. However, a senior UN Human Development official attending the informe’s follow-up “citizens’ panel” pointed out that to reduce poverty levels by a mere three percent would require an investment of around two billion pesos.
Criticism of Sandoval’s annual report came quickly, with National Action Party (PAN) federal legislator Lucy Perez Camarena calling the informe a “smoke screen” for the truth, suggesting there are “clear deficiencies” in public security policy (highlighted by an increase in the number of disappeared people), scant promotion of employment, virtually no action to combat corruption and a lack of social sensibility regarding public works projects. She said the policies to subsidize students with their uniforms, backpacks and transportation were populist vestiges of the “old” Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and did not confront the real issues and problems facing many families in Jalisco.
A poll published Monday by the Spanish-language Mural newspaper indicated that 60 percent of citizens in Jalisco believe insecurity to be the biggest problem facing Sandoval. The poll credited his biggest successes as helping the most needy, creating important infrastructure in metro-area Guadalajara and assisting students with their expenses. His biggest errors: insecurity, lack of support for municipalities far from Guadalajara and government corruption.
Sandoval’s approval rating is hovering at a respectable 6.7 out of 10, down just one-tenth of a point from 18 months ago.