In the Gard, the communist Patrick Malavieille, president of the public interest group Alès-Cévennes, and the mayors of three municipalities are worried about the new city contracts which will come into force on 1er January 2024, and from which Anduze, La Grand’Combe and Saint-Ambroix could be ejected. The main reason ? The number of people living in the neighborhoods concerned no longer reaches the threshold of 1,000 inhabitants, effectively excluding these sectors from priority geography, according to the criteria of the national agency for territorial cohesion.
These three Gard communes belong to the former mining basin of Alès, on an economically devastated territory, where precariousness is omnipresent. They benefit from the city’s policy through a contract started in 2015. “These contracts are coming to an end and the new version does not seem to want us”says Patrick Malavieille.
At the gates of the Cévennes, La Grand’Combe, a town of 15,000 inhabitants in the 1970s, has seen its population drop (4,800 inhabitants today) and Trescol, which housed the families of miners, has become an extremely impoverished district. “We demolished some HLM to make collective vegetable gardens, and residents left to live elsewhere. We improve the living conditions of the most precarious citizens and somewhere, it comes back to us”criticizes the mayor Laurence Baldit (Communist Party), very worried, because Trescol only counts… 957 people.
“The city policy is very helpful. We were able to build a multidisciplinary health center and an intergenerational park which works very well. We are going to work on our file, review the criteria relating to the median income of the inhabitants”, continues the elected official who relies on these budgets. In 2022, the Grand’Combe benefited from 300,300 euros.
State disengagement
In Nîmes, the prefecture confirms that “these municipalities are potentially outgoing”. On the side of Anduze, the ecologist mayor Geneviève Blanc does not want to believe it. “Among the inhabitants in great precariousness, many do not respond to the census and pass under the radars of Insee, said the mayor. It cannot be a decision criterion. This contract must be renewed at least once more. »
In this city popular with summer vacationers, once you have passed the main tourist thoroughfare, its restaurants and postcard sellers, another reality is revealed inside the historic center, where the unemployment rate exceeds 20% ( 22.6% in 2019). “We have hired a social mediator who accompanies the families in their steps and helps them a lot with literacy”continues the elected, who also cites economic initiatives for the return to employment, the opening of a designer boutique and for tomorrow, the emergence of a third place, if the contract is renewed. “For this project, we are counting on European funds for 40% to 60%, which we will only obtain if we are in a political context of the city. »
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