The EU monitoring committee visited the St. Martin Tourism Office information kiosk on the Marigot waterfront.
MARIGOT--The Collectivité received a delegation from the European Commission February 9-10 who came to see how well projects financed by European funds are working.
A visit was also made to Colombier to meet livestock breeder Emmanuel Gimenez.
The delegation comprised Loredana Von-Buttlar, head of the General Regional and Urban Policy Unit, representatives of the services of the Ministry of Labour, Full Employment and Integration, and the Ministry of Overseas France.
Under the co-chairmanship of President Louis Mussington, Préfet Vincent Berton and Secretary-General for Regional Affairs, representing Préfet of the Guadeloupe Region, in his capacity as managing authority of European funds in St. Martin, the monitoring committee took place over two full days, with field visits and plenary and technical meetings at Secrets Hotel on February 10.
This Monitoring Committee is taking place at a very special time, at the crossroads between the closure of the 2014-2020 programmes and the launch of the 2021-2027 programme.
It was an opportunity for Mussington to recall “how valuable the support of the European Union is to us through its cohesion policy in meeting the challenges of tomorrow and issues of catching up that we still face today.”
These exchanges allowed for an initial assessment of the consumption of European funds in St. Martin over the 2014-2020 period, in particular the use of additional European Regional Development (ERDF) and European Social Fund (ESF) credits from which the territory benefited in 2021 and 2022 under the Recovery Assistance for Cohesion and the Territories of Europe (REACT EU) initiative of the European Union’s Recovery Plan.
St. Martin has been allocated an additional 42 million euros to respond to the devastating consequences of the health crisis and to support the economic recovery.
The 34 million euros of ERDF REACT EU funds have been used to finance 100% of the large-scale investment projects carried out by the Collectivité, local public establishments and the French-side hospital centre.
Some 8 million euros of ESF REACT EU credits allocated to the territory have made it possible to finance a dozen measures to reinforce the level of qualification and employability of young people and job seekers in the territory.
From an overall point of view, St. Martin has a programming rate for the ERDF of more than 111% of the total budget of 71.7 million euros (including REACT EU credits) for the 2014-2020 operational programme, while the ESF has a programming rate of around 99% of the total budget of 16.6 million euros.
In the context of the closure of the programming, the representatives of the European Commission nevertheless alerted the local authorities to the backlog in certification and efforts to be made by the managing departments by December 31, 2023.
For its part, the Collectivité was congratulated on the successful management of the 12.2-million-euro ESF global grant managed directly over the 2014-2020 programming period.
The ESF priority phases managed by the Collectivité on the Operational Programme (OP) show a programming rate of 102% and a level of certification and payment of almost 65% by December 31, 2022. According to the forecasts presented by local authorities, the total consumption of the global grant should be more than 90% by the end of the period.
Finally, at the time of the launch of the 2021-2027 programming of European funds, President Mussington and Préfet Berton both dwelt, during their introductory remarks, on the colossal challenges to be met to allow conditions for a harmonious and sustainable development of the territory.
The 58.8-million-euro ERDF budget allocated to St. Martin for the period 2021-2027 should enable the effort to catch up on basic infrastructure to be continued and measures to support the local economic fabric strengthened.
Lastly, the 20-million-euro envelope allocated to the territory under the ESF national OP should enable the strengthening of education, training and employment support measures to promote the employability of people and to reduce the high unemployment rate in the territory, particularly among young people.
The next ERDF and ESF operational programmes will be officially launched in St. Martin in June 2023.
Field visits began on the Marigot waterfront, where renovation of the ferry terminal and the new Tourism Office information kiosk were presented. These two public tourism projects are being carried out by the Collectivité, the port of Galisbay and St. Martin Tourism Office. They were financed thanks to the ERDF REACT EU recovery funds.
The delegation then went to Colombier to meet Emmanuel Gimenez, manager of the Carib Gènes company, which specialises in livestock breeding, and then to the 978 Sanctorum restaurant, two private projects financed with the help of European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development FEADER funds.
In the afternoon, the delegation visited a project financed by ESF concerning professionalisation of informal fishermen.
