[Urbanstudy] Paris to revert to public water provision

[Vinay Baindur]

  FYI
[waterjustice] Paris mayor declares
coming back to public service


Dear Friends,

We would like to share a very important victory against privatisation of
water here in France: After months
of a quite hard discussion and lobbying between the "left"
parties, activist and the transnationals, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand
Delanoë,
announces the "retour" to a unique public service for water as one of
the main goals of his new mandate; ( he will be very probably elected again
in March 2008)



This is a big victory for our friends of
"Eau de Paris" ( greens ) and public operators from Val de Marne (
communists ) and all NGOs that struggle for public water; This is also a
quite symbolic victory against Suez
and Veolia in his own land.



After being evasive concerning the renewal of the Suez
and Veolia contracts, finally the socialist mayor decided to choose clearly
a
position against the renewal of the two contracts, signed in 1985 by Chirac
when
he was mayor;



*******************************************************************



Le Monde , 7 november



" The mayor wants to take this historical opportunity
to take the entire control of the water management, that was partially led
to
private groups in 1985; (..) ' I would like to propose to Paris
habitants a public operator which guarantees the quality of water at an
affordable price' (…)

' A single public owned operator that manages
all the cycle of production and distribution of water'



"At the Paris
council, the Green and the Communist party have been struggling for a
long time to come back to public management. (…) Anne Le Strat,
president of the Paris
Water company, says she is satisfied with the mayor's decision; "



**********************************





The entire press statement, in french, is in our
website
http://www.france-libertes.fr/


__,_._,___
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/attachments/20071109/8cd94e23/attachment-0003.html