The deputy director of the Provincial Highway Directorate (DPV), Alfredo Bel, estimated the amount derived from the collection of the Rural Real Estate tax that will go to the maintenance of local roads at 10 billion pesos. It will be after the Legislature approved a rule that raised to 50% the percentage of tax collection that would be allocated for this purpose. However, he admitted that it will not be enough. He also mentioned again the tolls on provincial routes.
The Chamber of Deputies of Entre Ríos turned into law, this Wednesday, the initiative of the Executive Branch that modifies article 37 of Law No. 9,602, for the increase of the percentage allocated to the Road Development and Conservation Fund, which becomes established with 50% (previously it was 20%) of what was collected from the Rural Real Estate Tax. The fund will be administered by the Provincial Highway Directorate (DPV).
The deputy administrative director of the DPV, Alfredo Bel, explained to Radio Costa Paraná that after this measure promoted by Governor Rogelio Frigerio “starting this year, Roads will have 50% of what is actually collected from the Rural Real Estate Tax, which will be allocated to rural roads”, but he admitted that the funds collected will not be enough to meet all the needs in that matter.
These funds – around 10 billion pesos – “with all the will and predisposition could reach December, which is when the tax ends being paid,” said Bel, and stressed that “only the deficit of materials that we have in brushwood and gravel, in current values, would represent an investment of 40,000 million.”
“This money that is going to start arriving will be assigned 100% to rural roads as a priority,” Bel confirmed.
The official emphasized that the panorama “is tremendously complicated” because in addition to the rural roads, 19 of the 21 provincial routes “yes or yes have to be intervened with potholes and there the governor has established a budget so that, little by little, we begin to buy materials and cover the wells.”
Knowing the complications that the poor state of the roads generates in the production and social life of the towns, he said that “in the province we have to go to a comprehensive solution to this issue and we committed to (the administrative director of the DPV) Ezequiel Donda, when we took office, to work on that comprehensive proposal.”
Different reasons –climatic, above all–, he explained, “are leading us to always work with the emergency” but “we are going to think about solutions that are more stable over time and that allow us, not perhaps in a year, But in 10 years, there will be an important change in the state of our routes and roads.”
Bel, finally, recalled that Frigerio has already said publicly that Entre Ríos, like other provinces – Córdoba, specifically – “is going to move towards a system where part of the works are supported by tolls. There is no money and public works are very expensive, and no matter how much we try to do it with the greatest austerity, it is not enough to rebuild the complex state we find ourselves in,” he concluded.
