It was a tsunami that swept away the senior administration of the city of Marseille. A wave from which emerges, eighteen months after the victory of the Marseille Spring in the municipal elections of 2020, a new organization chart redesigned in its attributions and almost completely renewed on the human level.
“This is an unprecedented reform that I do not think there is an equivalent in another community. A restructuring necessary to restore to working order an administration which had been overdue for too long ”, gauges the socialist mayor Benoît Payan, who arrived at the helm in December 2020, after the exchange of his post of first deputy with the ecologist Michèle Rubirola.
Officially launched by a deliberation of the municipal council on February 8, 2021, reinforced by a second text validated on July 9, the renovation of the Marseille high administration is radical. The thirteen Deputy Directorates General (DGA) that the city had during the last term of Jean-Claude Gaudin (Les Républicains) give way to seven DGAs whose perimeters have been largely restructured, concentrating skills.
A single deputy directorate-general remains managed by the same person: the DGA “protected city” directed by the commander of the battalion of firefighters, Rear-Admiral Patrick Augier. A soldier, appointed in collaboration with the State, who has worked very closely with the new Marseille elected officials since the start of the health crisis. The other general managers, often former traveling companions of Jean-Claude Gaudin, were pushed towards the exit. “From our arrival, we knew that we would have to act on the administration to start the new political cycle. These positions are the guarantors of the application of the new municipal orientations. We can’t keep some of Mr. Gaudin’s friends and hope that things go well ”, recognizes Arnaud Drouot, the chief of staff of the new mayor. “We have a certain administration which did not understand that the town hall of Marseille had changed majority”, released a year ago, in full city council, the ex-senator Samia Ghali.
“We nicknamed them ‘Robespierre'”
At the level of service management, the scale of the changes is just as unprecedented: “We went from more than seventy directions to around thirty. And all positions have been called into question ”, details Olivia Fortin, deputy in charge of the operation and transparency of public action. Heads have rolled, services are restructured. “All the directors were paralyzed, even those who had not been unworthy”, testifies a former municipal administrative machine, turned upside down. The unions saw it as a brutal takeover. “At first, we nicknamed them “Robespierre”. We can understand the political will for change, but was there a need to replace everyone? “, asks Patrick Rué, secretary general of FO for Marseille territorial agents. His union, the majority in Marseille, also voted against the overhaul of the DGA during the technical committee.
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