"We are no longer in a race for greatness", underlines Nathalie Appéré

• Re-elected mayor of Rennes last week, Nathalie Appéré was appointed president of the city on Thursday evening.
• She explains in an interview given to 20 Minutes the main issues of her mandate.
• The priority will in particular be to consolidate sustainable and local employment.

It had the support of thirty mayors out of the 43 that make up the urban community. It is therefore no surprise that Nathalie Appéré was appointed president of Rennes Métropole Thursday evening, just one week after being re-elected as head of the Breton capital. Succeeding Emmanuel Couet, who will leave political life, the elected socialist will therefore preside over the destinies of a metropolis of 450,000 inhabitants for the next six years. For 20 Minutes, she talks about her roadmap and the major challenges of the mandate.

You are now mayor and president of the metropolis. Why did you choose to combine the two positions?

The destinies of Rennes and its metropolis are intimately linked. When we think about a project for Rennes, this implies skills that are now metropolitan such as the question of transport, mobility or housing. The administration is also shared between the central city and the metropolis, as is governance, which is shared. And for the inhabitants of the 42 other municipalities, Rennes and its city center are a common good. Daniel Delaveau and Edmond Hervé have already assumed these two functions, so it will not be a first in Rennes. And this is, moreover, the most frequent situation in metropolitan areas today.

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The metropolis now has 43 municipalities. Will the territory expand further?

During the previous mandate, we worked a lot on metropolization with the acquisition of new skills. Even before, we had expanded the territory, with new municipalities that had joined us. From now on, the challenge will be that of territorial cooperation. We need to work more with neighboring intermunicipalities, as we already do with Saint-Malo, for example, for the tourist and cultural offer. Certain services, for them to be effective for the inhabitants, sometimes need to be thought of in larger perimeters. We also need to be able to better involve residents in metropolitan policies. For example, I would like us to work on a citizen factory on the climate on a metropolitan scale.

Are the ambitions of the metropolis lowered?

Not at all. But today, the era of competition between cities is completely over, we are no longer in a race for greatness. What now prevails are the alliance of territories and cooperation in the service of the quality of life of the inhabitants, the fight against global warming and the consolidation of sustainable and local employment.

There is a risk that there will be damage on the employment front with the coming crisis. How can the metropolis act?

The unemployment rate in mainland France is still relatively low and we will do everything for that. I therefore hope that we will quickly adopt an ambitious economic recovery plan because the coming weeks and months will be decisive in consolidating employment. This will go through a support plan for each sector. We also want to build an industrial campus on the Janais site which will be dedicated to the low carbon industry. If you want a diversified job, you have to have industrial job on the metropolitan territory and the Janais has all the assets for that. The metropolis also has civil and military assets in the field of tech and cybersecurity and it is imperative that we support this development.

On transport, what are your priorities?

This will be the pricing policy. From the start of the school year, we will make proposals and implement our commitment to lower prices, especially for those under 25. We will also rely on the brand new urban travel plan which gives more space to bikes and carpooling, with also an improvement in the rail offer. And very quickly, we will think about the layout for the deployment of the five tram bus lines beyond the ring road. The objective is to circulate them by 2027.

The trambus, good or bad idea to reduce traffic jams? https://t.co/7T47WemIYi

You mentioned during the campaign the project of a zero pesticide territory. How will it be set up?

This is a clear course that we are setting with the elimination of synthetic pesticides in 2025 in the city of Rennes and in 2030 in the mainland. It is not an incantation or a symbolic measure. The idea is not either to stigmatize one another or to create cleavage. It is a question of accompanying the farmers towards new practices and of achieving a win-win contract with inhabitants eager for an environment and a quality food.

The abandonment of the Zenith was activated during the inter-lap. What justified this decision?

The Covid crisis made us rework our roadmap with the awareness of new emergencies to manage but also the scarcity of our resources. So we prioritized the projects and with my fellow mayors, we opted for the renovation of the Muzik Hall. The construction of a new room would have represented a substantial budget in terms of investments but also in operation.

Is the Open Sky shopping center project in Pacé also definitively abandoned?

My predecessor had already spoken on this subject and I fully share his analysis. Today there is an environmental emergency and the need to support downtown businesses. All this makes this project completely unsuitable and therefore it will not happen. We must now work with the municipality of Pacé on how the spaces that will not be used by Open Sky can be allocated to something else.

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• Elections
• Municipal
• Metropolises
• Interview
• Nathalie Appéré