Coalición Canaria, the Partido Popular and Lanzarote en Pie Sí Podemos have decided to join forces in San Bartolomé and this Monday they have offered a joint press conference in which they have criticized the "policy of lies" and "we are on it" that, in their opinion, is being carried out by the mayor of the PSOE, Alexis Tejera.
In their appearance, which was attended by seven of the eight councilors that make up the opposition, they have questioned that the current government group "is characterized by living off the income and by having turned the phrase "it is not the responsibility of this City Council", into its headline expression, every time the opposition raises its motions in the plenary sessions".
The councilors have thus denounced the "continuous disregard of the mayor for the work of the opposition and the initiatives presented by them", although they all reaffirmed their intention to "continue working so that each and every one of the initiatives that are raised to the plenary, in favor of a better quality of life for the people who reside in San Bartolomé, become effective".
"The industrial zone on offer"
"In seven months of government, their only achievement has been to eliminate the 3% tax on the ICIO (Tax on Constructions, Installations and Works), benefiting the businessmen and charging the services to the neighbor and that in the last 14 months has meant 220,000 euros for the City Council", stressed the spokesman of Coalición Canaria, David Rocío, who, in addition, has stressed that Tejera "has put the industrial zone on offer, reducing the economic capacity of the municipality and deviating from the problem posed by the accesses".
"The solution is not to put the industrial zone on offer, if they do not focus on the accesses we will lose important investments, a lot of money and employment. They put it on offer to see if they deceive someone but they are only deceiving themselves", he warns.
Likewise, in his meeting with the media, Rocío recalled in this regard that CC presented an amendment to the budgets of the Government of the Canary Islands to incorporate a item that really makes a work that for the PSOE is a thing "of the future".
In addition, the nationalist spokesman said that he does not understand "the contempt that the wine sector of the municipality is suffering, which has been left, for example, without the demanded wine museum, nor that a response has not yet been given to the situation of the CEIP El Quintero".
The efforts, he says, "must focus on developing the land of the educational center and carry out there not only the school, but also a residence". "If it is necessary to ask for a loan and that the City Council finances it independently, it will have our support, but what we are not going to support is a policy of patching, of haste and without direction", he warned.
The PP demands a reduction in the IBI
The second to speak was the spokesman of the Popular Group, Lorenzo Reyes, who, like Rocío, spoke of "a government that has invested seven months in promises without results". "Our objective is to continue working for all our neighbors, for that reason, for example, we request a reduction in the IBI, lowering the tax rate, which is the one that applies to the cadastral value and that the City Council currently has it at 0.8, when the law and the central government allows us to play with the coefficient between 0.4 and 1.3 %".
Reyes recalled that currently the collection of the general IBI in the City Council of San Bartolomé reaches a figure that exceeds 3,500,000 euros according to the forecast of the current budget.
"There are ways to recover that drop without the City Council having to go into debt and one of them is to start working, especially, on a very crucial issue such as the budget. It cannot be that a party that has been governing for 12 years is not able to get annual budgets out in a timely manner", he stressed.
"Lack of transparency and obscurantism"
For her part, Maite Gorriz, councilor of the confluence Lanzarote en Pie - Sí Podemos, has referred to "the lack of transparency and the obscurantism that the government group flaunts, despite presuming the opposite". On this, the councilor affirmed that "the minutes of the plenary sessions are not seeing the light on the website of the City Council since 2018, which makes it very difficult for the neighbors of this municipality to access everything approved by the plenary of the Corporation".
She also criticized the "misuse" that she considers the government group makes of institutional information channels, such as the municipal mobile application, and questioned the situation of the municipal kennel, "badly managed, where the neighbors of the municipality do not have access to collaborate walking the animals, and that lacks public procedures that allow the rapid adoptions of dogs".
But for the purple representative in the Consistory of San Bartolomé, "the most serious thing is the disregard of the mayor for the work of the opposition and the initiatives presented by them". For Maite Gorriz, the government group "is not doing enough to carry out the motions approved by the municipal plenary, despite being proposals to improve the quality of life of the citizens". "For our part, we are going to continue working so that these initiatives and all those that we take to the plenary to improve the lives of our neighbors become effective", concluded Gorriz.