Vilanant has inaugurated the restored building of the old rectory as a new location for the Town Hall. The government team, led by the mayoress Anna Palet, thus closes “the circle” started in 2015 when the council ceded its premises, which were the old schools, to the forty or so students of the school. Then, the Town Hall moved to the prefabricated modules where the students did class.
“Ensenyament left us the barracks, but it was necessary to think about acquiring a building to make the Town Hall, the dispensary and the post office, so we started working on it,” explains Palet. “It has been an eight-year journey, with an economic crisis and a pandemic, but we have finally obtained three grants”, remarks Palet.
Of the total cost of the works, 200,000 have been financed with Next Generation funds, 135,000 through the PUOSC and 100,000 from the Diputación. “Taking into account that the annual budget of the municipality is 300,000 euros, this is the work in capital letters,” explains Palet. Added to all this is the fact that the old rectory is a “very important” and “rooted” building in the municipality. “Being able to locate here has a lot of symbology,” he says.
“Now we close the circle that began ten years ago when we entered the City Council as a government”, explains the mayoress. “We found a very large debt and a municipality without infrastructure. We didn’t even have a dispensary and we had to propose a village project where we could have the equipment that any other municipality has”, she adds.
At that time, the building was being restored, which had always functioned as a school, and which the previous government team stayed on to make the Town Hall. It was a building built in the 1920s to accommodate students from this municipality and from Taravaus.
With the works, the students were transferred to two prefabricated modules and the equipment was rehabilitated to locate the municipal offices. At the same time, Ensenyament was asked to build a new school. A request that did not come true.
In 2015 the government team decided to reverse this situation and change the rules of the game. The students would return to the old schools and the municipal workers would settle in the barracks, until now.
