The Lanzarote Business Confederation (CEL) and the Lanzarote City Council held this Monday the second meeting of the working group and monitoring of water supply, together with the primary sector. Another meeting also took place to advance in streamlining the administrative procedures requested by local administrations for housing construction.
At the end of both, the business representatives and the island Institution emphasized the importance of working together to solve the main problems of the island from a public-private perspective.
The meetings were attended by the president of the CEL, Beatriz Salazar; the president of the Cabildo, Oswaldo Betancort, and the vice president Jacobo Medina, as well as members of the board of directors of the Confederation, the dean of the College of Architects of Lanzarote and technical advisors of the Island Institution.
Second meeting of the Working Group and monitoring of water supply
During the meeting of the working group and monitoring of water supply, both institutions agreed on the importance of declaring a water emergency on the island and being able to apply for subsidies that contribute to guaranteeing the supply in all municipalities.
Salazar expressed "her satisfaction with the progress of the conversations with the Cabildo to address the water problem in a comprehensive manner, which, in her opinion, involves declaring a water emergency on the island. She also thanked the president Oswaldo Betancort for his efforts to solve the problems that concern the island's primary sector."
"The second meeting of the working group on which is made up of the Cabildo, representatives of the primary sector of Lanzarote and the Confederation of Businessmen itself, has managed to establish a clear roadmap linked to the water emergency," he indicated.
For his part, the president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Oswaldo Betancort, said, with respect to the water crisis, "that the Cabildo has already requested the Insular Water Council to declare the water emergency that will come into force in January and will be active for the next six months, which will be linked to a series of measures that solve the difficult situation we are in now."
Both Beatriz Salazar and Oswaldo Betancort agreed that "the water crisis affects us all and our livelihood depends on it, so we cannot hide an obvious fact." They recalled that "these supply cuts are repeated every day, without going any further, last Friday up to 26 areas, mainly in the municipalities of Haría and Teguise, suffered cuts in the water supply.
For this reason, Salazar proposed the implementation of actions aimed at addressing this problem as a whole. Measures ranging from the improvement of the Teguise Agro-industrial Complex, through the implementation of a management office between the primary sector and the administration. "For this, it is necessary that a three-way agreement be signed between the Cabildo, the town hall itself and the primary sector, which will speed up the procedures that allow them to access European aid," he commented.
Likewise, the CEL advocated creating a single island supply market, as well as making a network of cisterns dependent on the administration to extract water at different points. He also placed special emphasis on the need to obtain funds for the maintenance of the water supply network, which currently suffers losses of 56%. "The primary sector has conveyed all these needs to us and their attention depends, to a large extent, on the declaration of the water emergency, so we understand that we are already on the right track," he added.
Urban efficiency plan
On the other hand, Salazar highlighted "the importance of unblocking the administrative burdens that block the construction of new housing on the island." In this regard, he defended the creation of an external figure of public-private collaborator, which is specified through professional associations, which by law have the power to prepare quality and conformity visas, with the aim of unloading administrative tasks. "It would be about launching a kind of One-Stop Shop to centralize management and unify urban planning management procedures," he argued.
In this sense, he announced that Cabildo, CEL and the College of Architects will work together to promote a formal agreement in the coming weeks. "While it is true that this action must come from the hand of increased staff and greater efforts in digitization," he added.
Likewise, the president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Oswaldo Betancort, said that "the meeting was productive and served, among other things, to take stock of the progress made in the last 15 months in terms of housing."
