The Cabildo Plenary has this Thursday approved the motion that empowers the president to sign an out-of-court agreement to end one of the lawsuits that the institution maintains with the Haría City Council over the Cueva de Los Verdes. The agreement reached by both institutions, focused especially on the fee corresponding to the City Council, "guarantees the unity of operation of the CACT and gives viability to the existence and operation of the entity; does not reduce the amounts that the northern city council receives at this time; promotes access for the municipality's residents to the Centers and promotes the specific Haría development Plan", summarizes the Cabildo.
With this approval, one of the lawsuits will be ended, but without entering into what is being decided in another. Thus, this agreement "comes to put an end to a judicial dispute over the payment of a debt", explained the Minister of Tourism, Echedey Eugenio. This is the procedure that Haría already won in the first instance and whose sentence ordered the Cabildo to evict the Cave and pay Haría a millionaire compensation for the tickets since the procedure was filed. On the other hand, the dispute over the ownership of the Cueva de los Verdes and Jameos del Agua would remain pending. In this sense, there is another procedure in the courts, undertaken in its day by the former mayor of Haría, José Torres Stinga, focused exclusively on the ownership of the properties.
"We are not talking about ownership in the Cave agreement. The ownership is clear, the Haría City Council has registered the land and the Cabildo has inventoried the civil works", explained Eugenio. The spokesman for Podemos in the Cabildo explained in this sense that the councillor indicated to them in the Board of Spokespersons that the "references to the possible ownership of the Cave and the Jameos" were removed from this agreement, "because there has to be another lawsuit in which the Court will have to say who owns the ownership, not of the land, but of what the Jameos and the Cave are in their entirety". That second lawsuit, however, according to Eugenio, "will not have effects on the management" of those two tourist centers.
The motion has been presented as a matter of urgency by the Minister of Tourism, Echedey Eugenio, and has passed with the votes of the Government group and the councillor of Nueva Canarias. The councillor of Somos Lanzarote Tomás López abstained, while his colleague Mari Paz Cabrera, who although integrated in Somos is a member of Alternativa Ciudadana, voted against. The rest of the opposition councillors, from Podemos, Ciudadanos and PP, voted in the same way.
A final canon and another per ticket
This vote comes after a negotiation against the clock, as the deadline given by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands to both institutions is about to conclude when they decided to suspend the dispute they were maintaining to reach an out-of-court agreement. After months of negotiation, the agreement has finally established a "final canon" for Haría of 0.60 euros for each ticket to Jameos del Agua and the Cueva de los Verdes, and 0.30 euros for those of the Mirador del Río.
Similarly, the institution explains that a canon of 5% of the amount of income from the sale of tickets corresponding to the Centers located in the northern municipality will be paid, once the amount of the final canon has been deducted, so that the total canon that the Haría City Council will receive will respond to the sum of the final canon and the canon per ticket, as long as this amount is not less than 500,000 euros. In that case, the Cabildo de Lanzarote "will guarantee that figure, unless the Cueva de los Verdes, Jameos del Agua and the Mirador del Río cease to operate due to force majeure", explains the institution. "There would have to be a hecatomb and tourists would stop coming as they are now", San Ginés said in this regard.
Development Plan, monitoring commission and "enjoyment" for the residents of Haría
Likewise, the agreement refers to a specific Haría development Plan linked to leisure, sports, crafts, sustainability and the environment, among others, which will be partially financed by the Cabildo de Lanzarote for 10 years. "A plan", commented Echedey Eugenio, "that will respond to the peculiarities of Haría and its residents, who opted in their day for the conservation of the environment and its artistic, cultural and ethnographic heritage to the detriment of mass tourism". The estimated amount will be determined each year according to municipal priorities and will not be less than 600,000 euros in any of the ten years.
Finally, it stipulates the creation of a commission to monitor the agreement, with representation from the Cabildo, the Haría City Council and the Centers. The Cabildo points out in its note that, in addition to contemplating the "unity of operation and destination" of the Cueva de los Verdes and Jameos del Agua, the agreement "promotes the right to use and enjoy the Centers by the residents of Haría, to overcome the distancing that has occurred in recent years".
In addition, the agreement "promotes the right to use and enjoy the Centers by the residents of Haría, to overcome the distancing that has occurred in recent years", the institution points out. This right will be effective, at least, with two events organized by the northern Consistory in coordination with the CACT. "We want the residents of Haría to be participants in the CACT, to visit them, to experience their concerts, their cultural programming, to become the best prescribers and enjoy their gastronomic proposal. We want the residents of Haría to feel in the Centers as in their own home", says the Minister of Tourism.
"Provides legal certainty between these two institutions after 50 years"
"An agreement", said Eugenio, "protected by the jurists and legal teams of the Centers, the Haría City Council and the Cabildo de Lanzarote and with favorable reports from the departments of the Secretariat and Intervention of the First Island Institution and the northern Consistory, which does not reduce the properties and rights of the Cabildo or the Haría City Council, and which regulates and gives legal certainty to the relationship between these two institutions after 50 years".
The president of the Cabildo de Lanzarote, Pedro San Ginés, and the Minister of Tourism of the First Island Institution, Echedey Eugenio, agreed in pointing out that "the Centers of Art, Culture and Tourism of the Cabildo de Lanzarote; the residents of Haría, in particular; those of the island, in general, and the Cabildo de Lanzarote itself should be congratulated today". The agreement approved this Thursday "serves as an epilogue to a sad and painful controversy" and "opens a new framework of present and future relations between the Cabildo de Lanzarote and the Haría City Council", they pointed out. San Ginés and Eugenio also wanted to "publicly thank the attitude and will that the parties have shown during the negotiating process that has led to an agreement that puts an end to the situation that the society of Lanzarote has suffered, as well as the role played by the government partners, the Socialist Party and the Party of Independents of Lanzarote, and that of the only opposition councillor, the representative of Nueva Canarias, who had the vision that could be expected of all", they conclude.
For his part, the vice president of the Cabildo de Lanzarote and spokesman for the Socialist Party in the Institution, José Juan Cruz, pointed out that "we have always advocated a negotiated, consensual solution that does not involve a difficult economic burden to assume. The situation has been very delicate since the claim of the Haría City Council has reached judicial instances and these have forced an agreement that must be signed before October 31. The Consistory will receive six million euros from the first Island Institution during the next decade; six hundred thousand euros each year destined for the development of the municipality".
The spokesman for the Party of Independents of Lanzarote, Manuel Cabrera, expressed, for his part, "the joy that it means to have taken a first step to resolve a conflict that should never have been reached".
