The Mayoral Wonga

How much should a mayor be paid do you suppose? To answer the question you have to know what he or she does exactly, which admittedly isn’t easy to get a handle on. A mayor does a lot of signing of things, puts in any number of appearances around and about, shakes a fair number of hands, chairs a few meetings, gets his or her photo taken pretty much every day.

There is a bit more to it than this and the mayor, more or less, is responsible for however many lives there are on his or her manor. It might be said, therefore, that a mayor should command a decent pay packet.

The question as to the mayoral salary has become an issue in Sa Pobla. Here the new mayor, Gabriel Serra, admitted a while back that the town hall was to, all intents and purposes, bust. Against this background and a further admission that the town hall will invest in no building works at all other than to perform urgent maintenance, the opposition’s claim in early July that the mayor was going to be trousering nearly 4,400 euros a month did cause a slight rumpus. Assuming this entails 14 monthly payments, as is the wont locally, then Serra was due to be on over 60 grand a year.

Sa Pobla, it might be noted, is a smaller municipality than its neighbour Alcúdia, a tourism town where the town hall and therefore the mayor’s remit is somewhat greater than a place that exists for little more than agriculture. The lady mayor of Alcúdia, Coloma Terrasa, will receive a salary the same as her predecessor – 2,100 euros net per month. On the face of it, there is something of a discrepancy with what Serra was said to have been going to be earning.

Said to be, because Serra has published his pay slip. It shows he’s getting 2,137 euros net, quite a deal less than the opposition had claimed, and pretty much identical to the salary of Alcúdia’s mayor. How the amount has come down by 50%, assuming it was ever intended to be nearly 4,400, one doesn’t quite know, but down it has indeed come.

In Pollensa the mayor is getting 2,914 euros a month gross, which puts his take-home at roughly the same as Serra’s. So the mayors of the three towns are now all making the same as each other; gross salaries, amended to take account of the two extra months in the year, of something over 40 grand.

Is this a fair amount? Is it too much, or is it too low? Who knows?

A full-time post in public service, and in the cases of Alcúdia, Pollensa and Sa Pobla, this means running towns with 19,000, 17,000 and 13,000 people respectively, should be reasonably well paid, especially if it is the only source of income. But this isn’t necessarily the case of course. Many a town hall official, mayor or otherwise, tends to have business interests as well. A prime example was Muro’s one-time mayor, Miguel Ramis. His interests? Well, there was the small matter of the Grupotel chain that he founded.

Ultimately, whether a mayor is worth his or her salary cheque depends on how well he or she performs, and performance can mean whatever you want it to, especially when the mayoral office is a political appointment and can count on the support of the relevant party (or parties) to ensure that performance is spun as being effective.

Yet the town halls are in financial crisis, not solely due to current economic hard times. Their tardiness in making payments to suppliers is the stuff of legend, and pre-dates economic crisis. But this should surely be a key measure of how well a town hall is being run or not. Alcúdia and Pollensa, for example, have been shown to typically take up to six months to make payments; you will hear of examples where payment has been much later (if at all).

It is when companies are faced with cash-flow crises of their own, thanks in no small part to being unpaid by municipalities, that one can understand there being some disquiet as to salaries that are paid to mayors, and not just to mayors. Full-time officials other than a mayor can expect to receive 1,800 euros per month net. And then you have the costs of town halls’ personnel, which have gone through the roof since the start of the century.

A mayor can in theory be held to account. But widespread concerns exist as to a lack of transparency at town halls. Mayors, and other officials, should be made to show that they earn their money. It’s a performance age, but performance as a measure has been slow to catch on in Mallorcan local government. The town halls and the mayors need to publish what they are doing, when and why they are doing whatever it is they are doing, and what they expect the results to be. Then at least we might be able to judge whether they are worth the money. And you never know, maybe this might show that they are worth more.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Comprehension Lessons: Education in Mallorca

Hype, spin, fantasy. Ill-informed, wrong, misleading.

Pick any of the above. Now interpret it. Comprehend it, in other words, by using other words, and also be able to use it in context.

You are probably not a student at a secondary school in the Balearics. Were you to be, you wouldn’t be much good at interpreting or comprehending. And this is not an English test. Interpretation of text, any text, is something you’re pretty lousy at.

Why choose the above words? It can often be revealing to discover what is trotted out on the internet in the name of Mallorca and the Balearics, and which can be any of the above. “Fantastic.” “High standards”. Just two examples of what is said about education in Mallorca. You can interpret these examples as being indicative of these words. Or rather, you should interpret them thus, if, that is, you take time to look at the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report into educational standards which is produced under the auspices of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

This report looks not only at national standards. In the case of Spain, it breaks them down by regions. Not all, because not all are covered, but most. In three main categories – mathematics, reading comprehension, science – the Balearics are in the bottom five. In fact, only in maths do the Balearics climb out of the bottom four, and only the Canaries and the “autonomous cities” of Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, are worse than the Balearics.

Fantastic? Doesn’t sound like it, does it. Of the three measures, the Balearics are below the Spanish average and, by quite some margin, the OECD average.

The findings are significant. They give a wholly different impression of educational standards than the “hype” would have it, and there is an unmistakable pattern to them. The four non-mainland parts of Spain are the worst places for children to be educated. This raises its own question. Are these places somehow disadvantaged when it comes to the provision of education? There is another possibility. Maybe they’re just not very good. The teaching unions would suggest that there is a disadvantage and an inequality between regions of Spain.

If one considers economic performance and levels of wealth as indicators of advantage or disadvantage, there is something to be said for this argument. Ceuta and Melilla have the lowest GDPs of all the Spanish regions. The Balearics rank only 12th out of the 17 regions plus the two autonomous cities, but there is a very different picture when you consider GDP per head of population. The Balearics are one of the wealthier regions, up there with the big earners such as Madrid, the Basque Country and Catalonia.

Living and educational standards do not necessarily coincide, but a generally accepted principle is that the higher the standard of living, the better the education. So what’s going wrong in the Balearics?

For some, the low standards being achieved will be evidence of the politics of language. Possibly so. The problems with comprehension could indeed be evidence of this, as may also be the level of immigration. But there is arguably a more important issue, and it is one that contradicts the “fantastic” image. It is one of indiscipline and poor motivation and one, moreover, which debunks the notion that higher standards of living automatically mean better education. Or better pupils at any rate.

In state schools, and one probably should distinguish between public and private education, a complaint that is made is that disruptiveness is often the product of children of the better-off. Why should this be? A reason lies with the wealth and with the knowledge that an education doesn’t matter if there are over-indulgent parents who will see the kids right when they leave school. A further issue, and particularly so in coastal areas, is the lifestyle. The beach, the summer and all that goes with them are seductive in creating a laidback atmosphere. It might sound great, but not if it inculcates an attitude whereby school is an inconvenience prior to papa setting you up in a bar or the family business or your taking a job as a waiter or on a boat.

It is no coincidence that the best-performing regions are the likes of Castile-Leon and Madrid. It is also no coincidence that two other regions with strong sun-and-beach connections aren’t that much better than the Balearics, namely Murcia and Andalusia.

The language of education and the constant fuss that surrounds it will probably be singled out as the reason for poor educational performance, but to do so would be to disguise other factors which may be the real reasons for this performance. Whatever the reason, interpret the words correctly and don’t believe the hype.

* The findings of the report relate to 15-year-old pupils. All regions of Spain were included except for Valencia, Extremadura and Castile-La Mancha.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.