Chamber approves bill that suspends excerpts from Lula’s decrees on sanitation

The Chamber of Deputies approved this Wednesday (3) the draft legislative decree (PDL) that suspends provisions of two decrees by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) that change the legal framework for basic sanitation. The project received 295 votes in favor, 136 against and 1 abstention. The matter will now be forwarded to the Senate for analysis.

The text approved was a replacement by Deputy Alex Manente (Cidadania-SP) for PDL 98/23, authored by Deputy Evair Vieira de Melo (PP-ES), to which 11 other PDLs are attached on the same topic, informed the Chamber Agency. Earlier, the deputies had voted on the urgent processing of one of these joined projects. Thus, the merits of the matter were also analyzed this evening.

According to the authors, the decree allows for the regularization of current contracts that should be extinguished without the possibility of renewal, which would prevent the holding of a bidding process for contracting the service. The defenders of the regulation argue that it benefits small cities that would not be of interest to private companies in the assembly of blocks of municipalities for the regionalized provision of service.

“We are suspending the hiring of state-owned companies in several states without bidding and the possibility of counting irregular situations as part of the economic capacity”, said the rapporteur.

Possible changes in the decrees by the PDL

With regard to Decree 11,466/23, the substitute approved by the Chamber suspends the section that allows the sanitation service provider in operation to include any non-formalized provisional contracts or even instruments of a precarious nature in the process of proving economic and financial capacity.

The decree allows companies to regularize contracts with the holder of the service or the regionalized provision structure until December 31, 2025. The PDL also suspends another article that lists various documents that the sanitation service provider must present to prove its capacity economic-financial until December 31, 2023.

In Decree 11,467/23, the project suspends five devices with details of regulation of the regionalized provision of sanitation services. In this type of provision, the municipalities are aggregated to enable the execution of the service with a gain in scale, which may be in metropolitan areas or even in blocks of cities that do not share territorial borders.

The sections whose suspension was approved by the plenary allowed the coexistence of more than one service provider within the same regionalized structure, so it would be possible to carry out a bidding process for only part of the municipalities covered if others already had contracts in force or situations of direct provision by the member municipalities .

Government leader regretted the approval of the project

During the discussion of the proposal, the leader of the government in the Chamber, José Guimarães (PT-CE), tried to negotiate a longer term to reach an agreement. He regretted the approval of the text. “Those who are defending this new sanitation framework have not been concerned with those who need it most, because what prevailed was economic interest,” he said.

Deputy Fernando Monteiro (PP-PE), author of one of the projects, said that he had tried to negotiate with the Civil House since last week, but that the government did not manifest itself. “Silence, for me, often speaks louder, and he spoke louder that the government did not want an agreement. That the government didn’t want to talk, it just wanted to buy time”, said Monteiro.