At the end of 2020, during the electoral campaign, we encouraged the signing of the Sustainable Cities Program letter of commitment for candidates for Curitiba's City Hall and City Council.
The letter of commitment was signed by several candidates, including the current Mayor Rafael Greca and two elected councilors, and had as one of its main commitments the implementation of the Key Objectives Plan, in the format recommended by the Sustainable Cities Program.
When we studied further Curitiba's Organic Law still in 2020, we found that there was already a mention for the creation of the city's Key Objectives Plan, but in a much vaguer format than the one adopted by more than 70 Brazilian municipalities, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Florianópolis, Londrina, Foz do Iguaçu, etc.
Therefore, we started an advocacy campaign to try to regulate the organic law through a bill, aiming to bring Curitiba to the same level as the other municipalities mentioned above, with more participation, transparency and guidelines for the key objectives to be adopted.
We created a timeline of the whole advocacy process, which lasted until September 2021.
In summary, the bill did not pass the Constitution and Justice Commission of the Curitiba City Council in a vote held in September 2021, alleging arguments of redundancy (a Governance Plan, which has goals, has been published in the last two administrations) and interference between the legislative and executive powers.
We from Kurytiba Metropole, as well as more than 70 Brazilian municipalities that have the law in the format we were proposing, and the Sustainable Cities Program, disagree with these arguments. In the timeline above we also attached a report by jurist Celso Bandeira de Mello that deals precisely with the issue of interference of powers. The report was prepared for the municipality of São Paulo when the law was being approved and contested there.
We were surprised by the resistance encountered during this process of advocacy and regulation of the Key Objectives Plan, given the commitments signed by representatives of the executive and legislative branches during the campaigns last year, but this is part of the political and democratic process.
We hope to build even more robust arguments to be able to bring this change to Curitiba in the future.
And during this time, we will work with the goals and the Governance Plan already made by the City Hall and we will evaluate the cities of the metropolitan region on the issue of the Key Objectives Plan.
We thank all of you who supported the process!
Kurytiba Metropole Team