The Popular Group in the Cabildo of Lanzarote and La Graciosa has taken advantage of the plenary session of the Debate on the State of the Island to ask the current government of PSOE and Podemos “to turn the page, focus on what is important and face the resolution of the real needs of the people”.
For the Popular Party, the fact that the pandemic set the pace in the first two years of the mandate, the start of this mandate, "what is incomprehensible is that the presidency has used the remaining time to shake off the thorns and settle pending political scores.” Councilor Jacobo Medina has reproached President Dolores Corujo for having spent “three years constantly looking in the rearview mirror and doing what she said in her inauguration that she would not do, such as wasting time in mud with those whom the votes sent to the past, in her own words.”
During his speech, Medina defended the work carried out by the councilors of the Popular Party during the first two years of government in tourism, economic promotion, employment, transportation, security and emergencies, and public works. “You saved the furniture thanks to the management of the councilorships of the Popular Party, which once again proved to be up to the circumstances, and I sincerely believe that you have nothing to reproach us for in the good and efficient management of our areas. In fact, many of the government measures that we are seeing in these months are the culmination of that work done with seriousness, responsibility and loyalty,” said the councilor, addressing the president.
For the Popular Party, "it would be good if the current PSOE-Podemos government abandoned the dialectical mudslinging against the opposition and concentrated its efforts on solving the serious problems we have as an island and as a society."
In this sense, Jacobo Medina has questioned that a government that calls itself “of the people” has a “phantom housing office” and has been “unable to launch the Island Plan to fight poverty announced three years ago,” when there were 5,043 people in Lanzarote in a situation of severe poverty and 2,932 households where people lived on less than 292 euros per month. “We would like to know how many of the 5,000 people have benefited from this plan and how many households have improved their situation through direct actions of the Cabildo, considering that the matter has not been discussed again,” said Medina, who was also especially harsh with the management of dependency and socio-health care for our elders after the paralysis of the new Tahiche center project and the delay in the insularization of home care.
“On the island there are more than a hundred dependent people on the waiting list to enter a residence, so we are facing a matter of social emergency and as such it must be addressed by the government of the Cabildo,” he recalled, “has also failed in matters of disability by renouncing the social agreement for the management of services.”
From the ranks of the Popular Party they have also stressed "the submissive attitude of the current government with respect to the governments of the State" and the Canary Islands in matters such as irregular immigration, in which “the government of all the people of Lanzarote is not heard to demand more resources with which to face the resurgence of the arrival of boats,” recalling that so far this year, around 8,900 people have arrived in the Canary Islands, 50% more than the arrivals in all of 2021.
The delegation of own competences to other administrations in environmental matters and water or the inability to adapt the PiOL to the land law and having to start from 0, were other matters questioned by the Popular Party, together with the policy of confrontation that the new government has undertaken with some municipalities that are not of the same political sign.
“We want and must talk about the future, set a roadmap and close major island agreements in those matters that are of special importance to the island and that should be outside the changes of party that occur in the Island Government. It is essential to reach agreements in matters such as planning, infrastructure, health and social-health services, water, renewable energy and heritage,” said Councilor Jacobo Medina.
“And we must do it jointly with the municipalities because the Cabildo must always be there to lend them a hand and not to confront; the Cabildo is there to help and not to block; the Cabildo is there to provide solutions and not to generate problems, because if anything should always prevail is the spirit of cooperation with local corporations. And when a municipality feels affected by a problem, what the Island Government has to do is attend to or echo its needs and not use silence or guerrilla warfare as a response to those municipalities that are not of the same political sign,” Medina emphasized.
