How Many Mayors Can Puerto Rico Afford? Tradition and Budgets Collide
QUEBRADILLAS, P.R. — Far from the bustle of the capital, San Juan, in places where time walks slowly, jobs are scarce and colonial history dates to the era of pirates, some of Puerto Rico’s most powerful figures — municipal mayors — spend their days obliging, cajoling and demanding.
Townspeople line up at their doors to plead for help: Abuela died, and no one can pay her funeral expenses. Can you help? Yes. The wood in my house is rotting. Can you help? Yes. The town needs another baseball field. Can you help? Yes. My cousin needs a job — can you hire her? Let me see what I can do.
It is a ritual as familiar to the 78 mayors who oversee Puerto Rico’s 78 large and small municipios, or municipalities — a few no bigger than several square miles — as the nighttime trill of the coquí frogs and the relief of summer downpours. But with Puerto Rico carrying $72 billion in debt afterdecades of borrowing and overspending, and an independent, federally appointed control board poised to take charge of its finances, municipios —with their mayors, employees and government offices — represent one of the island’s most intractable problems. What was once a venerable tradition has become a symbol of government bloat and deficit spending, a costly affliction that also stretches to myriad central government agencies and the legislature in San Juan.
“In small towns, these things are personal,” said Heriberto Vélez Vélez, the mayor of this north coast municipality, who spent a recent morning dealing with requests from constituents in his nondescript office, a short stroll from a postcard-pretty Spanish-style plaza and church. “And in election years, people want more jobs, more help. It’s hard.”
For decades, that help came easily as money flowed steadily from San Juan, the seat of the territorial government (and a municipio itself). Trimming trees, attending funerals, picking up garbage, fixing sidewalks and erecting water parks, bowling alleys and ice rinks have long garnered mayors the good will, and votes, of their people. The savviest ones pay this forward by wrangling votes to help elect lawmakers to the Legislature, imbuing them with considerable political leverage. Grateful lawmakers repay them with money for municipal projects (or pork-barrel indulgences, depending on your view).
Now there are renewed calls to do away with a sizable number of municipios, most of which are ailing financially, by folding smaller ones into larger ones and creating regional hubs. The debate pivots on a simple question: Does an island with a footprint slightly bigger than Delaware’s and a population of 3.5 million (and dropping) really need 78 cash-hungry municipalities to serve its citizens?
“The majority are bankrupt, and they keep living off the central government that maintains them, and the central government doesn’t have money now, either; it’s a Catch-22,” said Mario Negrón-Portillo, a former director of the University of Puerto Rico’s School of Public Administration. “We are going to have to make some hard decisions.’’
Each municipality — be it as small as 2,000 or as large as 355,000 — has a mayor, many of them well paid. Mr. Vélez makes $78,000 for overseeing a town of 25,000, according to the Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico. Then there are assistants and a string of administrative offices, like human resources, public works and auditing. Most also have their own municipal police (in addition to the state police), who deal with complaints and low-level crimes.
With jobs hard to find in Puerto Rico, smaller municipios are often the biggest employers in town. Quebradillas, known as the Pirate City, has 400 workers, costing $3.4 million, up from 260 a decade ago. Municipios can spend millions of dollars for things like events and public relations. Municipalities also get the bulk of their electricity free, something the government is trying to curtail.
“I can drive around Puerto Rico twice in one day,” said Jose L. Báez Rivera, a representative in the Puerto Rico House who was the lead sponsor of a bill to consolidate the number of municipios to 20 while preserving their current names and boundaries as neighborhoods. “Why do you need to have so many municipios?”
Running 78 municipios costs several billion dollars a year, he said. There is $4.8 million in mayors’ salaries, $91 million in costs related to running the mayors’ offices, $1.1 billion in payroll and $2.2 billion for local budgets, he said. Cutting the number would save hundreds of millions of dollars, he added. Employees, he said, can be cut over time through attrition; some will retire, and others will join the exodus to the mainland United States.
But consolidation remains a tough sell in the Legislature — where most lawmakers want to avoid upsetting local mayors — and on the ground. In Quebradillas, where the plaza has a gazebo, a church dating to 1823 and manicured trees, women talk of faraway relatives, those gone to the mainland, on folding chairs in the shade. People set up flea markets inside sagging but beautiful colonial buildings. They take pride in their stellar municipio basketball team, their town festivals.
They say they know that there are too many municipios and that costs are too high. It makes sense, they say, to consolidate offices. But few want to sacrifice their own municipios. Instead, savings should come from elsewhere — the Legislature, the governor’s office, all those state agencies.
For those pushing for change, this reluctance poses a problem. Residents of a municipio must approve its elimination by referendum, an obstacle that has previously proved too great.
Alfredo Padin, 66, and Neil Sosa, 75, sat at a domino table this month in Quebradillas under the shade of a tree with three other players. The men complained of too many wayward mayors (theirs is O.K., though, they said), too many agencies, too much corruption. Consolidation, though, does not solve the problem, they added.
“You still have to serve the people,” Mr. Padin said. “I think the best way is to eliminate a chamber of the Legislature. Get rid of them.”
Stepping outside his indoor flea market, where a friend sang with his guitar, Adalberto Muñoz, 61, was harsher. “Here in Puerto Rico, any little parcel of land has a mayor; it’s ridiculous,” he said. “New York City has 10 million residents and only one mayor.’’
But many Puerto Ricans savor the personal touch of municipios. As children clambered on a pirate ship inside Quebradillas’s water park, Amelia Rivera, 43, offered advice. “Leave the municipios how they are,” she said. A resident of nearby Sabana Grande, a municipio of 24,000 people, Ms. Rivera said her mayor had given her a job for a time and helped her rebuild her hurricane-damaged house. He helps her mother with transportation. “We need their help.”
In their defense, mayors say municipios are more nimble and often provide services more cheaply than the central government. “We are more efficient,” Mr. Vélez said.
But with budgets that routinely exceed revenue, more than half of the municipalities carry deficits, according to government statistics compiled by the newspaper El Nuevo Día and the nonprofit group Abre Puerto Rico Policy. Most have high poverty rates, many retirees, few jobs and shrinking populations. All owe substantial sums in loans, a trait shared with the central government.
Each municipio also has a municipal Legislature — elected bodies typically of 1,000 to 1,500 members — that approves budgets and projects, and deals with citizen requests. For this, the members receive expense money and per diems. Political analysts said the assemblies had forever been little more than a rubber stamp for mayors’ agendas.
Making matters worse, most municipalities, even those with budget surpluses, like Quebradillas, depend largely on funds from the central and federal governments. In 2014, Quebradillas had a $10 million budget and a surplus of $5.5 million. But with a poverty rate of 57 percent and unemployment at 18 percent, Quebradillas can raise little money through sales tax and property tax. As a result, more than 40 percent of its money came from the central government and 20 percent was federal funds.
In the nearby Florida municipio, where 12,000 people live in 15 square miles, Mayor José Gerena Polanco eliminated one day of work a month for his 291 employees to avoid layoffs. This helped shave the deficit on his $8.2 million budget. With so little economic activity and a tiny tax base, he said, uniting with other municipios makes some sense. But services — garbage pickup, the police — should remain untouched.
“Our residents have needs,” the mayor said. “They come to us. They know us. We can’t throw that away.”
To stay afloat, Mr. Vélez, who belongs to the party in power, the Popular Democratic Party, has invested in what he calls self-sustaining businesses to increase revenue and create jobs. The well-attended $2 million water park he built brings in $200,000 a year. An $800,000 miniature golf attraction studded with pirate figures opens soon. A go-kart track is planned.
Critics call these “obras faraónicas” — pharaohlike vanity projects — and said there was no money for them. “This can’t be sustained,” said Mr. Báez, the House member.
For Mr. Vélez, these projects give him a cushion for the turbulence he expects once the oversight board starts scrutinizing the island. “My fear is that the junta” — the control board — “will pay bondholders and not attend to the needs of the people,” he said. “Then more young people and professionals will leave. We will be a country of old people. And the United States will have to deal with that.”
The main square of Quebradillas, one of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipios, or municipalities.
How Many Mayors Can Puerto Rico Afford? Tradition and Budgets Collide
Comments