15,000 euros, 17,000 euros. 4,000, 5,000 euros… Many figures have been announced in recent days around the ceremony of wishes from the mayor Sandrine Dauchelle. A ceremony that upsets many people in these times of local financial crisis. In the regional daily press, the elected official affirmed between Christmas and New Year that the 2025 ceremony, scheduled for January 11, would reach 4,000 euros. For France 3, the price of the ceremony should not exceed 5,000 euros. The two figures are consistent with each other.
What is less coherent, however, are the declarations of Sandrine Dauchelle in mid-December, during the last municipal council. The sum of 15,000 euros had been announced, and, in the hubbub of a agitated session and heated exchanges, the figure of 17,000 euros was thrown around.
The 17,000 euros: “A communication error”
Responding to the subject of the price of last year’s ceremony, the mayor announced that it had cost “at most 17,000 euros”. Before ensuring that the 2025 ceremony would not exceed this amount. Even if it is true that everything less than 17,000 euros is… cheaper, the general director of services, Chokri Mastouri confessed this Thursday, January 2, “a communication error” during this council. “We were talking about the cost of the previous year, and not that of this year,” assures the DGS. For Chokri Mastouri, there is no possible debate: “The arbitrations have been completed for a month, and they were already completed during the council, so the cost of the ceremony has not changed in recent weeks.” And the cost of this new ceremony should therefore be between 4,000 and 5,000 euros according to the town hall.
The right arm of the mayor of Noyon explains this drop in the cost of the ceremony (from one year to the next) by the use of city agents on tasks previously entrusted to external companies such as “the animation or video. By videos, we mean small clips, generally made to present the retrospective of the completed year, and also the mayor’s speech, never delivered on stage live, but said in front of the camera in her office days in advance.
Recent examples of real cost manipulation
End of the debate on the price of the mayor’s greeting ceremony? No way. Firstly because the opposition, which launched this debate during the last municipal council, thinks that it should have been simply deleted. What Patrick Deguise, opposition leader, recalls in a press release from the Noyon Passionnément group: “During the last municipal council, we asked Sandrine Dauchelle to cancel her greeting ceremony given the financial situation of the city and of the tax effort that she had asked of the Noyonnais.”
But the debate is also alive and above all because the same opposition quite simply contests the bills announced each year by the mayor of Noyon, believing that they are systematically and considerably reduced. For his demonstration, Patrick Deguise based himself on the wishes of 2023, for which the city had confessed a total cost of 15,557 euros. The invoice was detailed as follows:
– Buffet: €7,200
– Decoration: €350
– Management: €500
– Sound video: €2,000
– Balloon sculptor: €650
– Candy bar: €657
– Magician: €1,700
– Facilitator: €2,500
But according to Patrick Deguise, this detailed total “forgets” two large invoices: “The logistics amounted to nearly 20,750 euros, he assures, and the invitations sent by the Post Office at full price amounted to at 4,920 euros.” A total cost of 41,227 euros for the former mayor. More than double. In terms of logistics, Patrick Deguise counts the bill for a Compiégnoise events agency, The Bon Sens, which we revealed at the end of 2023 (see opposite). “This is a service including the preparation and decoration of the Easel in 2023,” explains Patrick Deguise.
The cost of last year’s ceremony, in 2024, is more difficult to sort out: “The problem is that after being caught with your fingers in the jam jar in 2023, the following year , Sandrine Dauchelle had dispatched and buried the costs of her ceremony in other cash lines, assures Patrick Deguise. And as it still denies us access to public accounting – which is a right – it is very complicated to produce precise figures.” Refusing the opposition the right to enter into the details of the accounts is for the mayor, according to Patrick Deguise, “a way of hiding the costs, of pretending that a ceremony cost “only” 15,000 euros — an amount that the city already couldn’t afford last year — and ridiculously low compared to the actual amount.
For 2025, an unrealistic cost?
And for the year 2025? Can Sandrine Dauchelle really organize wishes that cost “only” 4,000 euros? “No,” retorts Patrick Deguise without hesitation, “just the cost of postage exceeds this amount,” he assures. He took his calculator: “We hear, like last year, the figure of 3,000 invitations sent. They were franked at 1.25 euros this year, which is almost 4,000 euros in postal costs alone.” Assuming that the mayor actually sent 3,000 letters, but without counting the cost of the invitation card, its printing and the envelope. Conclusion: “Even by involving the agents – and moreover while the agents work on the ceremony, they do not do anything else – we cannot organize a ceremony which costs as “little” as it does. wants to do it,” concludes Patrick Deguise.
Also attacked on the cost of his wishes at the time when he was in business, the former mayor finally defends himself from having “never exceeded 7,000 euros, the year when we presented the new logo of the city , a somewhat opulent ceremony, but all inclusive, notably the cost of the agents’ work. The former majority invited the people of Noyon in particular through the municipal newspaper. Far, for example, from the crazy public display campaigns, particularly in 2023, campaigns which had gone well beyond the borders of our department…
A ceremony redesigned without the associations…
But we know that it remains important for Sandrine Dauchelle to fill the Easel for her wishes. The former mayor assumes: “We had between 200 and 250 people in the Chevalet reception room and not on the stage. This year, the mayor, by inviting the high school graduates, by promising them rewards, wants to fill her room by aggregating ceremonies which, before, took place at other times of the year, it’s a little ridiculous, judges -he. A change of formula dictated, it is true, by the discontent of the associations which in previous years had been at the heart of the evening. A cut later on their subsidies, and we had to deal without them. But the associations will not really be absent on January 11, since they have planned to organize a “counter-ceremony” by demonstrating in front of the Easel during Sandrine Dauchelle’s wishes.
It remains to be seen what assessment the mayor will draw from the past year, and what prospects she will outline for 2025. The past year having been marked more by financial problems, budgetary controls, scandals linked to aggressive management and calls to order from the prefectural authorities, that by the concrete achievements, we imagine that the mayor’s speech must currently be the subject of a real headache.
