The Popular Party of Teguise describes as "regrettable" the agreement reached by CC and PSOE with respect to the amendments to the General State Budgets for 2023. Both parties have announced an agreement for the bonus of transport to include buses, in addition to railways, but "they have forgotten once again that "the boat is the only means of transport that the residents of La Graciosa can use", the popular party points out.
For the councilor of the Popular Party and resident of La Graciosa, Nieves Arrocha; "The agreement is an electoral strategy in view of the upcoming elections, because evidently until now they have not fought for subsidized transport for all Canarians. A strategy that also has the complicit silence of the Government of the Canary Islands."
The new Statute of Autonomy of the Canary Islands was approved in 2018, including in its text, more than 100 years later, that the Canary Islands are made up of eight inhabited islands and not seven. In addition, it includes the Economic and Fiscal Regime of the Canary Islands, a fundamental tool to counteract the costs of the singularities of the Canary archipelago.
At the time of the meeting between CC and PSOE, one of the issues they negotiated was the compliance with the REF. Arrocha points out that "the REF is not negotiated, the REF is complied with. It is a right of all Canarians, thus compensating for the characteristics of being a fragmented territory, an ultra-peripheral region of Europe and the distance from the peninsula. It is the obligation of the State Government to provide a budget item that guarantees the REF and therefore the equality of the Canary Islands with the challenge of autonomous communities."
The councilor of the Popular Party highlights that the inhabitants of the island of La Graciosa need the services provided by the island of Lanzarote, basic services such as renewing the DNI, going to Public Administrations, going to the pediatrician, going to the hospital for a medical consultation, going to the dentist, buying essential items or going to work.
The reality is that for all these trips a resident of the island pays the same for a boat ticket as any other citizen of the Canary Islands, therefore "it seems incomprehensible that given this special situation they do not include, as the Popular Party demanded, the 100% bonus on boat trips for residents of the eighth island".
"We, the residents of La Graciosa, are tired of them talking about us and that in reality politicians are using La Graciosa for their summer vacations and little else, because the socialist rulers continue to not give us equal treatment with the rest of the Canarians in something as basic and strategic as public transport", the PP councilor concludes.
The popular party hopes that in the budget process, both of the State and of the Canary Islands, CC and PSOE "rectify and include the transport bonus on the Órzola - Caleta del Sebo boat trip for residents of the island of La Graciosa, thus granting them the same right that the rest of the citizens of the Canary Islands have acquired", they conclude from the PP.
