MARIGOT: On the morning of Tuesday, October 11, exchanges took place at the prefecture’s office between local construction companies and officials from the State and the Collectivité to create an observatory of public orders in Saint-Martin.
Vincent Berton, Delegate Prefect of the Northern Islands, spoke to us during the Job Dating BTP last September about his desire to set up an observatory that would be a place for exchanges and debates between public buyers (State, Collectivité, hospitals, airports, port, social landlords, etc.) who will be awarding large public contracts in the coming years and the St. Martinese companies that are required to respond to these contracts.
At the beginning of August, the Saint-Martin Building and Public Works Association expressed its frustration with public contracts that are often awarded to foreign companies that have the material, financial and human capacities to respond to macro-lots. Unlike allotment, which consists of dividing a public contract into lots (electricity, carpentry, or by district) that are autonomous units, it favors access to public contracts for SMEs and, in fact, competition between companies.
Each lot, resulting from this splitting, corresponds to a distinct contract that is the subject of a separate contract and is therefore opposed to the single contract (macro-lot). Indeed, as Louis Mussington, President of the Collectivity explains: “After Irma, it was deemed necessary and useful to create macro-lots instead of allotment, we must return to this principle which is in the code of public procurement, I ask that the contracting authorities take into consideration this state of affairs. Allotment allows the greatest number of people to participate and respond to the public contracts launched by the various principals in the territory. For Vincent Berton, a general mobilization on public procurement on the part of the officials must be driven by opening the dialogue with local companies, listening to their grievances, and putting in place actions to better equip them, administratively, financially, and humanly. This starts with the training of young people in the building and public works sector, according to the Prefect: “We do not have the training offer that allows us to respond to the question of manpower from companies, even though the budget exists to develop it.
There is adequacy between the public money available and the training offer. An emergency meeting will be scheduled in the coming days between Pôle Emploi and officials of the State and the COM towards a strategy to launch training actions targeted at BTP.
Another important point that came out of this first meeting between construction professionals and officials is the public commitment of the latter to publish on their respective websites the calendar of upcoming public contracts. In this way, local companies will be able to anticipate and better prepare to respond to markets, by grouping together for example. The objective of this observatory and all parties are unanimous on this point, is that the money from public contracts flows to Saint-Martin with fiscal benefits for the Collectivity and, above all, that young person from Saint-Martin can find work in the construction sector, which remains a strength in the territory’s economic activity.
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