Almost R$2 billion of extraordinary expenses were allocated to the facing the Covid-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021, making Belo Horizonte is one of the largest cities in the country with the lowest mortality rate due to disease. This was one of the highlights presented by Mayor Fuad Noman in his first accountability hearing of the Municipality, on Thursday, the 31st, at plenary session of the City Council.
Fuad Noman emphasized actions to combat Covid-19 in the different areas of City Hall, with emphasis on health and social assistance policies. "Only for expansion of beds, vaccination, expansion of teams, among other actions, R$1.25 billion were allocated and another R$600 million for social policies (provision of basic food baskets for vulnerable families and public school students; hygiene kits; homeless shelter; emergency financial assistance)”, said Fuad.
In the area of Education, the Municipality transferred R$177 million to the units and R$27.5 million in the units of the partner network for expansion works, reform and maintenance, between 2020 and 2021. The economic recovery package, never seen in the city, was another policy cited by the mayor. The measures include: elimination, reduction or installment of fees, public prices and IPTU, benefiting
200,000 city entrepreneurs.
According to Fuad Noman, in the most critical years of the pandemic, the City Hall also intensified the policy to reduce bureaucracy and digitalization of processes, creating conditions for access to services in a 100% digital way, both for citizens as well as for active and inactive servers. Currently the Municipality offering 649 fully digital services (55% of the service portal), 109 of them also made available through the Belo Horizonte City Hall App (as of December 2019 were
42.
All this work has put the city in first place in the Contest Innovation in the Public Sector of ENAP, in the category “Innovation in services or policies in the State Executive Branch, of the Federal and Municipal District ”, through the work “Food security in times of pandemic: the case of Belo Horizonte”, on the use of registration system and georeferencing of families who received basic food baskets.