The PSOE of Lanzarote has rejected in a press release issued this past Wednesday "the propagandistic use" of the declaration of water emergency and has considered it "an authentic mockery, mere fireworks while families wake up without water, companies have to close and our farmers see their farms dry up."
For the island secretary of the PSOE, Loli Corujo, it has been unacceptable that Oswaldo Betancort has been since August of last year "promising to declare the water emergency, which demonstrates that he has not quite understood what the word emergency means."
"In the height of absurdity, Oswaldo Betancort has wasted the last month with the theatrics of taking to the Debate on the state of the island a proposal to urge the Consortium to ask the Island Water Council to declare the emergency, when he could perfectly do it as president of the Council," Corujo has reproached.
In the opinion of the socialist leader, the false expectations that Oswaldo Betancort has been creating since his press conference in August 2023, when he presented "his famous plan of urgent measures to solve the integral water cycle in Lanzarote that contemplated investments for more than ninety million euros that would be expedited, in addition, with the declaration of the emergency" are especially outrageous.
"Almost a year and a half later, the only measure put in place has been to bring two portable plants whose contribution has not been significant, according to the manager of the Consortium himself in one of the reports that Betancor now provides," explained the island secretary of the Socialist Party.
Corujo affirms that now the declaration of the emergency will be "more of the same":
"Contrary to what Oswaldo Betancort has stated, the declaration of the water emergency will not mean speeding up the contracting, since it will be the administrations that execute the works that will have to justify case by case the urgency, never the emergency, of those investments and they will have to carry out, also case by case, the mandatory technical, legal and intervention reports," she explained.
But the most worrying thing, in Corujo's opinion, is that Oswaldo Betancort "continues determined" to "assume with charge to public funds investments that must be undertaken by Canal Gestión Lanzarote."
In that sense, Corujo has recalled that the execution of a plan to sectorize and control leaks at the island level, one of the measures proposed by Oswaldo, is "a contractual obligation of Canal Gestión, as well as the repair of the breakdowns that cause those leaks."
"Oswaldo Betancort, instead of demanding that Canal Gestión comply with the obligations of the contract, now intends to detect and repair the leaks," Corujo explained, pointing out that "to top it off, the savings from reducing losses will only benefit Canal's income statement, since it does not mean that the price of water will go down," the socialist reproached.
Corujo has explained that, regarding the possibility of benefiting from subsidies, "as of today there is only a declaration of intentions in the budget of the Autonomous Community that establishes that to the extent that the execution of the budget allows it, a item of 15 million euros will be created for Lanzarote and Fuerteventura for the water emergency."
It is "a pie in the sky, as already happened with the 2024 budget, and the requirement to be in an emergency situation does not correspond to any legal requirement, but to the will of the Government of the Canary Islands to call the item that way."
"The water emergency is completely unnecessary to respond to the needs of Lanzarote and its approval is nothing more than an attempt by Oswaldo Betancort to demonstrate that he is doing something for water in Lanzarote, when the truth is that he has wasted almost a year and a half selling a plan that only remained in the presentation of a Power Point," Corujo concluded, pointing out that "we are not going to be accomplices of that theatrics, of that attempt to fool the people of Lanzarote who need water and not collections of occurrences."
