In the first six months of existence of the Citizen's Shop in Vila Nova de Famalicão, more than 56 thousand consultations were attended to, with a daily average of 624 users. The space that aggregates the IRN - Institute of Registration and Notary Affairs (Civil Registry, Land, Commercial and Automobile Registries), the Tax and Customs Authority (Finance), Social Security, the Citizen's Space and the One Stop Shop of the Building, was inaugurated on the 26th of July, after several years of demand from the local authority and from civil society itself.
Its opening has significantly improved the quality of the public service provided in Vila Nova de Famalicão, especially the services of the State, which used to force citizens to wait for long periods in very uncomfortable conditions, namely outdoors and without support equipment. The Civil Registry and Social Security were the most notorious cases.
The implementation of the equipment, in a central area of the city of Famalicão, was only possible through the signing of a collaboration protocol between the Agency for Administrative Modernization (AMA), the City Hall of Vila Nova de Famalicão, the Institute of Registration and Notary Affairs IP, the Tax and Customs Authority and the Social Security Institute IP, in which the City Council assumed the costs related to the provision, maintenance and logistics of the space.
"There has been a huge improvement in relation to what existed in the past" highlights the Mayor, Mário Passos, who makes a "very positive" balance of these six months.
Aware of the need to improve the efficiency of some services under the tutelage of the Central Administration, the mayor stresses that he will insist "in a persistent and determined way, with the competent entities, so that more resources arrive, namely, human resources, in order to make up for the lack of staff, a factor that inhibits the efficiency of this service".
It should be noted that the public services that users have used the most, in these six months of existence of the Citizen Shop, were Social Security, Finance and the Institute of Registration and Notary Affairs, in this order of affluence.
The Citizen Shop is located in the D. Sancho I Shopping Centre - former commercial surface "Inô" -, located in Rua António Carvalho Faria. Although the local authority had requested the Government to provide extended opening hours, the approved timetable ended up being on working days, from 9h00 to 14h30, and the shop is closed on Saturdays.
