The regulation to create the new Environmental Assessment Body of the Cabildo has ended up being approved this Thursday with the support of part of the opposition after the president, Pedro San Ginés, rectified up to two times on the proposal that had been taken to the Finance Committee on Monday. After the criticism that the entire opposition had made as a bloc, San Ginés began the session announcing in a "surprising" way, as he himself pointed out, that the members of that body will not be elected in the Governing Council but in the Plenary by simple majority.
Then, in the face of complaints from the different groups, he rectified again, accepting that the names have to be approved by an absolute majority, which will force him to count on the support of all his current government partners when the issue is taken to the Plenary. With these changes, San Ginés has obtained the favorable votes of the PSOE, Ciudadanos and one of the councilors of Somos Lanzarote, Tomás López, while the other representative of the formation, Mari Paz Cabrera, has maintained the vote against together with the councilors of Podemos.
The main reason for this rejection is that the president has not accepted the other proposal made by the Podemos group and to which the rest of the opposition had initially joined, asking that this body not be created until there are sufficient officials in the Corporation. In fact, during the session the Councilor for Finance himself, Luis Arráez, has acknowledged that there are 39 positions unfilled in the Cabildo and has stated that it is planned to put them out to tender now. However, San Ginés has later clarified that this call will not arrive in time for the new officials to be part of the environmental body, whose members will be elected for the next five years.
"Who has so much interest in this being approved urgently?"
"If they are going to take out those positions imminently, why are they going to go ahead and create that body without counting on the technicians? They say they are in a great hurry and the question is who has so much interest in this being approved urgently, without counting on the necessary technicians", said the spokesman for Podemos, Carlos Meca, who recalled that this body will be key to be able to approve planning instruments such as the Special Plan of La Geria, in which "the president was determined to shoehorn the illegal Stratvs winery", owned by Juan Francisco Rosa.
The request of Podemos was that an agreement be signed with the Government of the Canary Islands so that the Cotmac continues to prepare the environmental assessment reports until the Cabildo has the necessary personnel to create its own body, as established by the new Land Law approved more than a year ago. Precisely because of the time that law has been in force, Meca has questioned the "haste" to which the government group now appeals, when "they have had a year" to have been able to sign that agreement.
"Don't look down, don't look at your mobile", Carlos Meca asked San Ginés, while demanding an explanation as to why the creation of the body is being rejected. "Are you sending a message to Juan Francisco Rosa? Are you asking him if he is the one in a hurry? Well, yes, I'll tell you: It's him", said Meca, who, in the absence of a response from the government group, gave his own explanation of why they are trying to create this body with "haste". "Well, it's clear, because the one sitting there is not Pedro San Ginés", said Meca. "We are still waiting for the same thing to happen as in Mission Impossible, that one day the president takes off his mask and the cacique with the flower name appears".
Vote divided in Somos Lanzarote
For her part, Mari Paz Cabrera has distanced herself from the change of vote of her colleague from Somos Lanzarote and has spoken out against it. "The last-minute changes are not acceptable to me. Neither the last-minute changes nor the work done in a hurry. I don't find acceptable neither the uncalled commissions, nor the ones called in that way, nor the extraordinary plenary sessions in the middle of August and shoehorned in", she said, questioning that other points had been included in the agenda of the session "so that it does not seem that it was done only for this".
However, her colleague Tomás López ended up voting in favor after the changes that San Ginés has agreed to introduce, relating to the fact that the appointment of the members of this environmental body has to be approved in the plenary and by an absolute majority. However, in his first intervention, Tomás López had also criticized that it was created without counting on officials for it. "The lack of technicians is not a meteorological event produced by a natural catastrophe. It is the result of a way of governing", he reproached San Ginés, whom he asked to "take responsibility" for this situation.
Environment and territorial policy, "totally dismantled"
"We have the areas of environment and territorial policy totally dismantled. If that had not happened, if those areas had not been dismantled, we could form this body without fears or concerns", stressed Tomás López, who considers that this is the "demonstration of the inability of this president or this government group", and who initially had also asked that an agreement be signed with the Government of the Canary Islands so that the evaluation reports continue to be made from the Cotmac until the Cabildo has the necessary technicians to create its own body.
In addition, López has questioned that the Territorial Policy Commission has been "two years" without meeting and also the response that the government group has given to that, which states that the problem is that as president of that Commission is still the socialist councilor Marcos Bergaz, who left the government group a year ago. For that reason, López has demanded that this situation be corrected and that the profile of the possible members of the new body be debated in that Commission before taking it to the Plenary.
As for the PSOE and Ciudadanos, both have celebrated the "rectification" of the president, although Marcos Bergaz has also questioned that San Ginés seeks these "showmanship", taking "surprising proposals" to the Plenary instead of having raised them where it corresponded, that is, in the Commission held last Monday. For his part, Benjamín Perdomo has also insisted that it would have been preferable to delay the creation of this body until the positions of technicians were filled in order to have personnel from the Cabildo itself, although he has ended up giving his favorable vote.
San Ginés "proposes" Leopoldo Díaz
During the Plenary, San Ginés has also launched another "perhaps surprising proposal", in his own words, proposing that the director of the Island Plan Office, Leopoldo Díaz -whom he removed from his post and whom the Justice forced him to return to his functions-, be the person designated as secretary of the new environmental body. Thus, although he has begun by stating that he has not "participated at all" in the drafting of the regulation to create this body and that he does not "know any of the names of the people who are going to be proposed", he has then added that he himself conveyed that proposal to Leopoldo Díaz some time ago. However, he has also pointed out that so far he has not obtained a response.
"The body is six people plus six alternates. If you put a worthy and decent secretary but the rest are going to be close to certain businessmen or the interests of certain businessmen, I would think twice before accepting a position like that", responded the spokesman of Podemos after listening to the proposal of the president.
In addition, he has questioned what San Ginés and the government group understand by "independent" professionals, recalling the cases of the former councilor and current head of Food Sovereignty of the Cabildo, Francisco Fabelo, "who in the morning organizes cheese contests from the Cabildo and in the afternoon makes free cheeses for Juan Francisco Rosa"; and of the councilor of the Tourist Centers, José Juan Lorenzo, who is the nephew of one of the owners of the illegal Marina Rubicón marina and who considers that he has "benefited" that port, among other things, with the construction of the underwater museum in front of those facilities.
