Residents of Santa María Street, in Titerroy, have raised their voices against the Arrecife City Council, denouncing that the plants have been removed from the planters in the area “in very bad faith” and “without prior notice”, so they request to recover them as soon as possible.
“They didn't even warn us, they came and took everything away,” says a resident of that same street. “They didn't let us transplant them to other places,” he adds.
From the Consistory, in a document sent to the residents, they assure that they had previously spoken with them, warning them that “they were making illegal plantations”, but they deny it. "It is a lie," they say, claiming that they "justify" what they state in that letter signed by the Councilor for Parks and Gardens.
The planters were removed last Wednesday, May 28, as “part of the sanitation plan”, explains the neighbor. In addition, he maintains that in that subsequent writing it is reported that “the plants were harming the trees”, so they proceeded to remove them.
“Supposedly, they removed them because they wanted to protect the tree, but the tree is full of bugs, of cochineal, is that protecting it?” asks the man. “We can't even open the windows because the bugs get inside the houses.”
In the complaint, which has also been joined by the Titerroy neighborhood association, they request that they be sent “the technical report that says that the plants were damaging the trees” and ask for an explanation of “why no action was taken before, since these plants have been planted for a lifetime”.
“Now there is only soil left, where dogs stop to shit and piss”, says the neighbor. “They have told us that they are going to redo the narrower planters, only for the trunk of the tree, and that they are going to plant them, but I won't believe it until I see it, I'm not going to take care of them”, he points out.
“We had even planted native Canary Island plants, such as Poinsettias or Aloe Vera,” says the man. “The neighbors took care of the gardens and watered the plants because the City Council spent months without watering them.”
In the same letter they blame the City Council for not carrying out “any monitoring of the concessionaire company, where the facts have been reported on repeated occasions” and they ask “why the City Council staff are carrying out these works, and not the Canal Gestión staff, which is who it corresponds to”.
They also directly ask the mayor of Arrecife, Astriz Pérez, to “give the appropriate orders so that the plants that were removed are delivered to the owners”, since these have “great sentimental value”, and request that “study carrying out a change of the technicians responsible for the Department for the well-being of the green areas” of the city.
“The neighbors ask that they leave the planters as they were before, that they don't leave them like that because the dogs are going to come”, asks the man. “We can't be like this.”
