Etablissement Public Local d’Enseignement et de Formation Professionnelle Agricole et Horticole de Saint-Germain-en-Laye / Chambourcy

The agricultural and horticultural secondary school is located in the Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Chambourcy municipalities, (Ile-de-France Region), on the listed site “Plaine de la Jonction”, inheritance of the royal hunting in the 18th century.

The estate has been transferred from the presidential hunting to the Agriculture’s Ministry School Department in 1954.

The school consists of 5 poles of competences: the high school, the apprentice training center, the vocational training center, the horticultural farm and the landscaping workshop. The farm is specialized in horticulture: floriculture, market gardening, arboriculture and plant nursery. The school develops an educational garden (4.500 children per year). The landscaping workshop coordinates the area maintenance and manages the school projects.

The training courses on offer are: general scientific A-level, technologic education (Agronomy sciences and technologies, production, areas’ development and valuation), vocational training (agriculture, landscape design, horticulture, hippology, flowers).

GPS&O – Grand Paris Seine et Oise (urban community)

Created in 2016, the urban community GPS&O is part of the continuing process of a pioneer territory regarding inter-municipalities and urban/rural collaboration topics. It is intended to give more responsibilities at local level.

The will to constitute an urban community responds to the local elected representatives to create an overall consortium able to offer services in a uniform way to an extended territory, with a greater efficiency and lower costs.

Only inter-municipality close to Paris of more than 400.000 inhabitants, GPS&O is the most populated urban French community.

The activity in the Seine Valley goes back to the Middle-Age. Historic hunting, ploughing and grazing territory, it developed roads and “bridge-cities”, important interchange places.

The main decision-making body for the community is the community council; it takes all the important calls.

GPS&O also implements many actions with European funds, like the LEADER program (European rural development program based on a local development strategy). The “Group of Local Action (GAL) Seine” accompanies the entrepreneurs and assigns grants from the European Agricultural  Fund for Rural Development.

The Departmental Council of the Yvelines

The Departmental Council is the deliberative assembly, elected by direct universal suffrage, of a Department. Its mission is to deliberate and sort out the Yvelines affairs. This instance is in charge of the public service and its improvement.

The elected representatives meet on average once a month in plenary session. The counselors are 42; they are men and women from the ground, and close to the inhabitants.

From the social welfare to the infrastructures, the Council works to improve and strengthen the attractiveness of the territory. It’s the main partner of the communities and NGO’s.

One of the Vice-Presidents of the Council is Pauline Winocour-Lefèvre, in charge of the rural areas. She organized and is in charge of the “Rurality meetings”, a council’s initiative launched in 2014 to meet the needs of the inhabitants, to tighten the links between towns and rural areas, to give the territories keys for empowerment. The aim is to set up a voluntary and positive policy, able to break with bad habits of opposing the land and the town.