The plenary session of the Arrecife City Council held this Monday unanimously approved the motion of Lanzarote En Pie (LEP) regarding the creation of an autonomous working group for the right to housing.
“Many families in Arrecife have been forced to share housing or rent rooms because they cannot afford the current price of rentals. Meanwhile, the promised public housing that is slow to arrive does not provide an immediate solution to the housing problem in Lanzarote,” explained the spokesperson for the formation, Leticia Padilla, in relation to the table for the Right to Housing.
For this reason, Padilla requested, “not only those who govern in the Canary Islands but also all those who represent us in the autonomous Parliament, such as the mayor of Arrecife herself, to sit down and talk about the urgency of finding solutions to this problem together and in consensus to alleviate the lack of housing we have on the islands.” The spokesperson points out that this can be done “by creating a line of incentives to lower rental prices, negotiating with the banks that still have closed and unoccupied homes, or creating municipal rental offices that were approved by the plenary at our proposal in 2019 without anything being done about it.”
In this sense, the municipal spokesperson again asked Astrid Pérez, in her role as a regional parliamentarian, “to embrace this proposal and insist that the table be created because we are not only talking about social housing, but also the rest of the housing that citizens, despite having work, and therefore not being able to access social aid for rent, cannot afford to rent decent housing because if they do not exceed one thousand euros per month, paying rent on this island is impossible.”
Regulations for the use and management of official social networks
On the other hand, the plenary also approved the LEP motion “to carry out an internal audit to determine the status of the institutional accounts and profiles that the Arrecife City Council has on the various digital platforms of companies that offer social network services on the internet.”
The formation explains that this motion aims to “establish a basic protocol for the creation, use and management of official accounts and profiles of the Arrecife City Council on these digital platforms”, given that, as explained by the LEP councilor, Leandro Delgado, in the defense of the motion, “municipal social networks have been used without any type of organization, or control, when it is one of the most important means of communication that exists to connect with citizens.”
The LEP councilor expressed his hope that “once the result of the aforementioned audit is known, the consensual drafting of regulations for the management and use of the social networks of the capital municipal corporation will be carried out.”
In this way, the councilor requests that “the lack of transparency and rigor in the treatment and management of these official communication tools with citizens be ended; because a very strange use is being made of social networks that ultimately seems closer to party propaganda than to the communication of an institution that belongs to everyone.”
In this sense, Delgado took the opportunity to recall that “the visual communication of the city council has been modified, even the colors of the coat of arms, and when variations are made to the official image of the institution, the least that can be done is to have a consensus.”
Virtual Citizen Service Office
Finally, from LEP, they are pleased that the government group has admitted the approach that “the creation of a Virtual Citizen Service Office in the Arrecife City Council is necessary.” The formation adds that this creation will allow “a better administration of the resources destined to solve situations in person, which could be resolved through the application of the tools offered by new technologies for interaction from the Local Administration.”
“We have accepted the approach of the government group that has asked us for a margin of confidence to finalize the implementation of the system, so we have decided to withdraw the motion once the government has committed to reaching a consensus with the rest of the political forces of the corporation,” said Leandro Delgado, although he adds that they will remain “expectant to ensure compliance with this proposal.”
