The Tías City Council has just approved a proposal to modify the fiscal ordinance regulating the Real Estate Tax (IBI) with a package of measures that establishes two different tax rates, a 0.40% for residents with residential properties and a 0.50% for large real estate assets.
In this way, the government group formed by PSOE and Unidas Sí Podemos freezes the IBI of the residents and applies a surcharge to hotels or real estate for tourist use of greater value, “and not to all, only to 10% of those with the highest cadastral value, that is, equal to or greater than 500,000 euros”, specified the Councilor for Finance, Tomás Silvera.
Silvera added that this surcharge on the tax rate for the hotel industry “will be used to compensate the society of the municipality of Tías for the environmental and social cost of the industry and for social aid”.
The Councilor for Social Welfare, Nicolás Saavedra, pointed out that these revenues will be allocated “to rental assistance for Social Welfare users in social exclusion, many of whom are workers in the tourism industry itself, and to alleviate the precarious employment that involves the exercise of certain activities that distort or deteriorate the environment in the territory, without forgetting the improvement of the competitiveness of the tourism sector through sustainable, responsible and quality tourism”.
Silvera explained, for his part, that “it is unsustainable from an economic point of view that the tourism industry is sustained only by the taxes of the residents. We must all sustain public services progressively. And it is not fair from a tax point of view that the large tourism industry is sustained only by taxes from residents, since a linear type of IBI is paid whether you have a small house in a town or a large hotel”.
First municipality of Lanzarote to apply the Housing Law
With this reform of the fiscal ordinance of the IBI, which includes a varied package of fiscal measures, the City Council of Tías is the first in Lanzarote to adapt the ordinance to the Housing Law 12/2023 of May 24 to respond to housing problems and the housing emergency situation.
Among other measures, the modification increases up to 90% the bonuses for large families special and creates a new bonus of 95% for real estate for residential use intended for housing rental with limited rent by a legal norm, for example, declaration of a stressed area, or Officially Protected Housing (VPO) of new private promotion.
The City Council of Tías requested in April 2024 from the Government of the Canary Islands a diagnosis on the housing supply of the municipality so that it is declared a stressed residential market area.