Coalición Canaria has described the economic management of the current government of the Cabildo as a “resounding failure”, since it denounces that in the year that has just ended “it was barely able to execute 7.48%” of the investments planned in the budget, “that is, 4,267,400 euros, of the 57,050,747 euros that appear as definitive credit, leaving more than 52 million euros unexecuted”.
In the same statement, the party also acknowledges that during the management of CC in the Cabildo, which was chaired for ten years by Pedro San Ginés, the opposition's criticism of the low budget execution was also constant, but maintains that it has now “worsened”.
“In comparative terms, and although we cannot be satisfied with the degree of budget execution in recent years either, something that was so often denounced by the PSOE when it was in opposition in the Cabildo, it would be enough to compare the percentages of previous years with the current one, to see how the situation has worsened alarmingly since the arrival of the PSOE to the government, in pact with the Popular Party at the head of the Ministry of Public Works”, they say from Coalición Canaria.
In the press release, CC only provides data from 2020 and 2019, when the current government entered in the middle of the year. In that year, in which it admits that “shared responsibility” and “a certain slowdown in procedures due to the change of government” can be alleged, it maintains that “the execution of the budgets already fell to 17.92%, that is, they only executed 12,027,043 euros of the 67,105,356 euros foreseen in the definitive credit”.
However, as CC invites to do in its statement, La Voz has consulted the settlement of the budgets of previous years -of which it does not give figures in its statement and which correspond to the stage of San Ginés-, and the truth is that there are years in which the execution was even lower than that of 2019. Only in 2017, 4 million less were executed, with a total figure of 8,122,833 euros in investments, which represented 15.35% of what had been reflected in the budgets.
And although the execution rose in 2018, in the pre-election year, it did not reach 27.4%, leaving a real investment of 15 million. In addition, the following year -which began under the presidency of San Ginés and ended with the new government- they shot up the investment item, going from 55.2 million to 67.1. And since the vast majority could not be executed, the percentage decrease in the execution in 2019 was greater, standing at 17.92%, with 12 million euros invested.
Regarding last year, CC denounces the “ridiculous percentage of the real execution of the planned investment”, which when making the comparison reflects only four million less than what was executed in 2017, when in addition 2020 was marked by the coronavirus crisis and the period of confinement. However, CC considers that precisely at that moment investments should have been “accelerated to combat unemployment” and stresses that “the State Royal Decrees invited and aimed to lighten the contracting procedures”.
In addition, CC adds that “it also does not understand what could have happened in the Subsidies Chapter, so that in the same way the expenses committed on the committed credits, which were always higher than 90%, both in 2018 and 2019, fell to 66% in 2020, leaving 6.7 million euros in the pipeline”.
“In short, a pathetic management balance that of this unnatural PSOE - PP government, focused on a tremendous propaganda machine, but with irrefutable data that prove its failure as a government”, says the party, of which San Ginés continues to be a spokesman in the Cabildo, now in the opposition.
Criticism of the budget for 2021
In addition, in relation to the press release made public by the Cabildo on the budgets for this 2021, the nationalists affirm that “you have to have very little political shame to presume of budgets that are not true that they are approved in a timely manner and that still suffer from 14 million euros of budget allocation, among which are the aid to SMEs and the self-employed and practically all the aid to NGOs and groups, which have simply been painted in the Strategic Plan of subsidies but without budget allocation, and that unfortunately they will have to wait for the settlement of budgets and the consequent incorporation of the surpluses that they fortunately inherited from CC, so the aid will not arrive until well into the year”.
Finally, the party considers “incomprehensible that the current president, after almost two years at the head of the Corporation, continues with her obsessive fixation of looking back remembering the late approval of the budgets during the last decade, not only because she governed with CC in the two previous legislatures, both in that of 2011-2015 and in that of 2015-2019, but because of the direct responsibility that the PSOE had in two of the years in which the budgets were approved later during that decade”.
Specifically, it refers only to two years: the first of San Ginés, when he came to the Presidency in December after presenting a motion of censure against the socialist Manuela Armas, who was left in minority after breaking with the PIL after the Unión case, and the year in which one of the ruptures of the pact between CC and the PSOE occurred. In this regard, he points out that it was “one of the years in which the budgets of that decade were approved later”, although not the worst.
