[5) The fundamental
role of the Prefect
The prefect can indeed seize the regional room of the accounts
which exerts a control of the administrative type. The Prefect also can, with
intervention or not of the regional room of the accounts, to proceed, relative
with a not indexed obligatory expenditure, mandatement of office or an
inscription of office to the budget.
In addition to the control of legality, the Police chief of the
Republic to the load of the services external of the State in the
department . The prefect sees himself thus equipped, at the prefectoral
level primarily, of capacities increasing. This last becomes the interlocutor
central and impossible to circumvent local communities. Beyond his role in
jurisdictional or budgetary control, the prefect has the monopoly of the
signature of the conventions passed with the communities or their
publicly-owned establishments and plays a crucial part of coordinator of the
public actions.
It is a kind of Project Leader, of facilitator to the Anglo-Saxon
direction of the term, somebody which connects, and which thus plays a pivot
part in local political space.
As we will see it, the Prefect becomes thus the pillar of the
contractualisation defined by the improvement major and deep of the conditions
of decentralization because the devolution operated into 1992 continues like a
reform major of the State.
Created in 1800 pennies the Napoleonean era, the Prefect always
plays an essential part within the French administration because the department
remains the pivot of French administrative architecture.
Since the laws of 1982, they direct the services external of the
State, i.e. they direct and coordinate the action of the Heads of Department.
In fact, all flows of information pass through the prefects, who they come from
the center or which it are transverse. Since 1992, the department is thus the
administrative unit of reference and competences of the representative of the
government relate to various fields, the such culture, the law and order, the
medical and social businesses, the equipment. He is a permanent interlocutor of
the territorial elected officials and its knowledge of the local businesses
facilitate the processes of coordination related to the exercise of its
functions.
We can thus say that the role of the Prefect grows rich by
managerial responsibilities since one asks him to take up new duties expressly,
which it assumed perhaps implicitly, in addition to his prerogatives defined in
article 72 al.3 and who stipulate that it « delegated government to
the load of the national interests, administrative control and respect of the
laws ». The prefects of area, have as for them, a particular role
since they distribute the authorizations of program after opinion of the
Regional Committee of Action.
| 
