Making Points

Communities Of Communes

This could be another Clochemerle moment. The French government has decided to get rid of some administrative layers, a move that is indirectly making waves in Mollans. The layer affected is the community of communes, which lies between departments, of which there are 95, and communes of which there are thousands. The idea behind communities of communes is that they acquire and share resources that individual communes need or want but which they are too small to afford individually. The general assumption is that communities of communes should become more important and many communes should effectively disappear (i.e. have little or no budget).

The current situation in Mollans is that it is part of the Buis community of communes. This is a collective of 22 communes, 10 ten of which have fewer than 100 inhabitants and one of which has only 26. Whatever the commune's size, it has a mayor, councillors, secretarial support and a budget to match. This looks like obvious administrative overload and so some rationalisation is overdue.

Part of the government's plan is that all communes within a community should be geographically contiguous, to avoid isolated outposts. That seems sensible but creates problems in that communities at the moment are not stacked up in that way. So there has to be a reshuffle. This in itself does not affect Mollans and, at a meeting of commune mayors with the departmental Prefect in 2011, Mollan's mayor voted to stay part of the Buis community.

Two nearby communes affected are Brantes and Savoillans, which are part of a Vaison community but not geographically contiguous with it. So they asked nearby Malaucène to switch to the Vaison community to create land contiguity between them and Vaison. Malaucène declined. So they asked Mollans and Mollans changed its vote and agreed. Thus Mollans is to become part of the Vaison community as of next January. The obvious question is why; and therein lies the rub.

The mayor sent out a letter which failed to mention the change of vote and gave a number of high-sounding but for all practical purposes meaningless reasons. No one took much notice but suspicions were raised that local taxes would go up. Then the Buis community called for public discussion of the issue at a meeting in Mollans which the mayor promptly banned on very flimsy grounds. So the Buis community switched the meeting to Pierrelongue and provided a load of facts and figures explaining what Mollans contributed and got from the community. So where was the equivalent from the Vaison community so that the citizens of Mollans could discuss the issue and make up their minds? Not forthcoming, it seems, although one of my neighbours is planning to ask Vaison for that. From the Mairie there has just been a deafening silence so far, compounding suspicions raised by the failure to mention the change of vote and the banning of the public meeting. Are dark Machiavellian forces at play here? This story could run and run.

As a footnote, although it is inevitable that some communes will disappear, it is also sad. I view the very considerable decentralisation of budget for local government in France as a democratic strength; it means you can go along to see your local mayor personally and demand answers (although you may not always get them, as the current case shows). However, economics will prevail, which means that getting local accountability will become more difficult in the future.

Rewards For Points

I recently decided to use some of the points I had accumulated on my Super U supermarket loyalty card to acquire a toaster on offer as a reward. I was told I would have to wait a fortnight, as is normal when claiming rewards (they might have to order some rewards specially). But they had the toasters on the shelves. OK, I thought, maybe there is a different inventory system for rewards. Then, when I went to claim my toaster a fortnight later, the girl on the reception desk said: “Just a minute; I'll get one from the shelves”. ???????????? It seems that, whatever improved customer service might suggest, you have to wait a fortnight to claim a reward. Rules are rules, after all (and customer service is a minor consideration in supermarkets).