The well-known weaknesses of Local Government due, among other things, to the lack of specialized personnel, but also to the “cumbersome” QREN procedures contribute to the slow progress of the Smart Cities action, with a total budget of 235,285 million euros.
The respective invitation to participate in the 332 OTAs was issued on 24/01/2023. Until 31/12/2023, a total of 312 proposals – participations – were submitted. To date, only 52 municipalities have been included in the program (for a total value of 39 million euros) and only 6 of them have moved forward with the competitive procedures.
The Smart Cities action is implemented through the “Digital Transformation” Program of the QREN 2021-2027. Initially, it was included in the previous QREN. The amount for each municipality varies between 210 thousand and 2,770 thousand euros depending on its population and the logic was from the beginning that all municipalities would benefit.
The aim is to modernise local authorities with smart applications for sustainable circulation, energy savings, strengthening local democracy, protection against cyber attacks, strengthening digital infrastructure and a broader improvement of services provided to citizens, businesses and citizens’ quality of life.
Smart Cities projects amount to an average of 10 per Municipality and are selected from 38 proposed by the Municipalities themselves based on local needs.
Five most popular categories
Of all the proposals submitted by the 312 Municipalities, the five most popular categories are as follows:
• Integrated infrastructure for protection against cyber attacks (Network Firewall, Endpoint security, etc.) and the provision of a teleworking system chosen by 165 Municipalities.
• The single central platform for managing and collecting data on the digital transformation actions of OTAs (selected by 149 Municipalities).
• The organization of a traffic office and the management of a municipal fleet of vehicles (selected from 145 Municipalities).
• The smart cities/municipalities guide with local business listings (selected from 144 municipalities).
• The electronic payments management system chosen by 135 Municipalities.
According to what was said yesterday during the presentation of the progress of the program by the Ministers of the Interior, Thodoris Livaniou and Digital Governance, Dimitris Papastergiou, there is a need for greater mobilization of municipalities to advance the actions and at the same time, it is necessary to speed up the approval procedures from an administrative point of view.
The head of the Special Service of the “Digital Transformation” Programme, Manolis Giambouras, said that there are problems in the quality of studies and project costing, lack of supporting documents, changes of authorities in the OTAs and long delays in response times from municipalities.
He added that competitive procedures, completion of tender procedures, emphasis on operation, formality in procedures and advertising rules are required of OTAs.