The Plenary Session of the Cabildo of Lanzarote has approved urging the Government of Spain and AENA to implement a 75% discount on parking fees at the César Manrique-Lanzarote Airport for Canary Islanders, as well as the urgent repair of airport infrastructure such as escalators and elevators.
The initiative, jointly presented by the Partido Popular and Coalición Canaria, seeks to equate the cost of airport parking with the 75% discount that is already successfully applied to plane and boat tickets, applying the same logic of territorial balance to prevent insularity from continuing to translate into unjustified surcharges for the citizens of Lanzarote and La Graciosa.
“For a resident of a non-capital island like Lanzarote, going to the airport is not usually synonymous with holidays, but rather an obligatory and even daily route for vital matters such as attending a specialist doctor on a capital island, taking university exams, fulfilling work obligations, or resolving bureaucratic procedures,” stated the vice-president, María Jesús Tovar.
"The State already recognizes that isolation costs money," added Tovar, questioning the real impact of alleviating the price of air travel if an unsustainable "economic hole" is then generated when the citizen is forced to park their car to be able to travel.
Likewise, the spokesperson for Coalición Canaria, Samuel Martín, explained that the problem highlighted by the island corporation extends primarily to the staff who work at the airport premises. “There are many essential employees in sectors such as security, cleaning, ground staff, retail, and catering who are incurring exorbitant costs simply for clocking in at their workplace every day, because AENA does not provide them with sufficient solutions or reduced rates that are fair,” he pointed out.
Therefore, the motion approved by the Plenary Session of the Cabildo formally demands the provision of free parking or the implementation of reduced minimum rates for all staff at the premises.
In this way, the Cabildo of Lanzarote denounces the "situation of neglect" and lack of maintenance that the facilities of Terminal 1 have been suffering, where users and residents have been experiencing the impact of having the escalators and elevators completely broken for months, blocking basic accessibility.
Likewise, both parties of the Governing group censured the state of neglect of the airport's green areas, whose gardens have been completely overgrown and unmaintained for months, despite AENA having a gardening contract awarded for an amount close to 30,000 euros, demanding for all of this an immediate investment and repair of the terminal's connectivity and accessibility.