"Let them start the process of self-determination and from there let them decide what they are going to respect and what they are not." With this ironic invitation, the Councilor for Territorial Policy and Environment of the Cabildo, Carlos Espino, explained this Tuesday the sensations he has had upon learning of the letter sent by the Yaiza City Council attacking the First Island Corporation after it denied the opening and operation license to the Rubicón Palace hotel, a letter that in his opinion is "incredible" if one takes into account that the denial of the tourist license has nothing to do with the Consistory presided over by José Francisco Reyes.
The Councilor for Territorial Policy began his speech on the program Buenos Días de Radio Lanzarote disarming point by point the statement sent the previous day by the southern City Council, stating in the first place that one can never speak of "filtered resolutions" as they have done with the intention of insinuating preferential treatment to the media when these, the resolutions, are public and everyone has free access to them. "There is a huge mistake, because the Cabildo of Lanzarote does not filter the resolutions, it communicates them, because they are resolutions of a public nature and the activity we carry out obliges us to make citizens aware of the decisions we make and why we make them," he commented, adding that he would like things to be done the same in the case of Yaiza, "that we find out when it grants licenses, how it grants licenses, why it grants licenses, at what price the works that are tendered are valued." In fact, coinciding with the information that this newspaper advanced in its section of El Alpargatazo, he said that they have already become aware of the existence of hotels that cost around ten or twelve billion of the disappeared pesetas and to which rights have been settled for nine hundred, or "licenses that have been given on the same morning in which the technical report, the legal report, the mayor's resolution and the communication to the owner have also been presented." "We must congratulate the City Council for being able to do all that work in one morning," he ironized again.
On the other hand, Espino said that the press release sent by the southern Consistory is nothing more than "a collection of half-truths when not nonsense." Thus, he recalled that the Montaña Roja ruling to which he alludes had "practically null" consequences for the interests of the Cabildo and the Island as there are other instruments such as the tourist moratorium or the General Guidelines for Territorial and Tourism Planning of the Canary Islands. "Now it seems that they are interested in taking out the Montaña Roja ruling as a bogeyman with which they want to imply to society that the Cabildo has no capacity. I would like them to remember in equality plan the sentences in which the Cabildo has won," he stressed.
The councilor, quite angry, therefore recommended Yaiza to take into account that there is the possibility of requesting self-determination "to then comply with the rules and laws that they want to comply with." "Now, while they are united to the rest of the Spanish territory, they will have no choice but to swallow the reports of the Cabildo," he warned.
On the other hand, he bounced the accusation about the alleged "abuse of power" of the Cabildo to the southern Consistory, stating that "what the Yaiza City Council has done so far is an authentic abuse of power, by using the power of the administration to grant licenses and force the rest of us to run after him appealing them when those licenses have been given absolutely despising the law, using partial plans that had no validity because they had not been published, using old licenses that as little as we remove came from the time when Jean de Bethencourth passed through the Rubicon."
Nothing to do with territorial policy
Fully coinciding with the legal services of the Cabildo, Espino recalled that what the government group has done now, a purely tourist action, has nothing to do with actions linked to territorial policy. "You have to think that the main spokesman for certain situations of illegality that occur in Yaiza are not the companies, which would have the right to say that we are not acting well, it is the City Council, which surprisingly is the one that is talking the most," he stressed, showing his perplexity that a public institution dedicates so much time and so many resources to defending private promoters. "This interested confusion that they are trying to make with the opening license is not true. What we are talking about here is the tourist license, which is the exclusive competence of the Cabildo," he clarified.
Finally, responding to the great doubt that almost everyone has about the reason that has led all these establishments, to which the license has already been denied and to which they plan to deny it, to be in operation, he said that precisely in this area it was necessary to be understanding with the establishments and with the administrations involved, since the legalization processes are very slow. "While there was a prior authorization, the degree of tolerance can be understood. The prior license was given by the Government of the Canary Islands with a series of problems derived because they did not examine the urban situation of the area, hence they were given without prejudice to the municipal or island action," he explained, stating that "the problem arises when they want to convert those licenses into definitive ones and they reach the Cabildo." "The Cabildo, as it cannot be otherwise, at the time of converting them into definitive ones has to examine if the work that is intended to be legalized is carried out in accordance with the authorization that was given to it," he insisted.
