ICMA has implemented three programs in El Salvador. Most recently, in 2009, ICMA was awarded a three-year Municipal Partnership for Violence Prevention in Central America.

Earlier, through a Resource Cities Partnership, ICMA was able to bring together COMURES, the Corporación de Municipios de la República de El Salvador, with the Florida League of Cities (FLC) and the Florida City/County Management Association (FCCMA) over a period of two years to exchange experiences and strengthen the institutional capacity of COMURES.

And, working with the Inter-American Development Bank, ICMA supported the improvement of local government capacity to more effectively and efficiently provide services through a program that developed financial indicators and a system to classify municipal financial performance.

Municipal Partnership for Violence Prevention in Central America

In 2009, ICMA was awarded a three-year project to help Central American countries, including El Salvador, develop innovative violence prevention programs. Municipal Partnership for Violence Prevention in Central America, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) seeks to establish networks that share best practices and lessons learned in crime and violence prevention and reduction throughout the region. 

The formal objectives of the three-year program are:

• Promote comprehensive local-level violence prevention strategies and programs and foster development of regional peer knowledge networks that will be self-sustaining in the future.
• Employing ICMA’s CityLinks model, provide training and technical assistance to local governments and community groups in coordination with police and other local-level programs.

The municipalities of Sonsonate and Nahuizalco, El Salvador, were partnered with the city of Santa Ana, California. Through a series of exchanges, staff and officials from the city of Santa Ana and the Santa Ana Police Department are providing information and training on community-oriented policing and crime/violence prevention programs to their Salvadoran counterparts.

Resource Cities: COMURES/FLC/FCCMA Partnership

The overall objective of the Resource Cities partnership was to strengthen the Corporación de Municipios de la República de El Salvador (COMURES) to become a more financially and institutionally viable association and provide its members and staff with ideas and strategies that they could implement  in the area of advocacy, transparency, revenue generation, conflict resolution, and conference development.

ICMA managed this partnership as part of the Resource Cities Program, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The Florida League of Cities (FLC) and the Florida City/County Management Association (FCCMA) were partnered with COMURES from 1998-2000.

As a result of this partnership, COMURES devised strategies to improve its capacity to advocate on behalf of municipalities and to receive the support of its members for that advocacy effort. COMURES also developed innovative ways to provide services to its members and increase its revenues. COMURES staff and mayors were exposed to the Florida Sunshine Laws, which emphasized transparency in government by requiring complete openness at the local government level. As a result, COMURES developed its own Code of Ethics for its membership.

Design of Financial indicators and Classification of Municipalities

Working under contract with the Inter-American Development Bank, ICMA identified municipal financial indicators and developed a typology for classifying the financial performance and institutional capacity of municipalities in El Salvador. The ICMA team performed an exercise with a selected group of municipalities to test the indicators and typology. 

The 13 indicators selected by the ICMA team included financial solvency, autonomy and capacity, external and internal audits, and efficiency in tax collection, among others. Based on the research and tests, ICMA recommended ways to improve existing municipal financial information and publication systems.  Recommendations included the creation of a Technical Committee that included representatives of different national-level agencies and the national municipal association; and the development of mechanisms to provide incentives to good management and generate better information on municipal performance. This project was completed in 2001.