The opposition of the Yaiza City Council has finally accessed the documentation that it had been requesting since May regarding the granting of urban planning licenses by the southern mayor, José Francisco Reyes, which have been the reason not only for an appreciable controversy throughout the Island but have also led in many cases to the opening of legal disputes with the Island Council. In a first glance at the five boxes that have already been sent to them, they have found numerous issues that they do not like.
This was told this Friday by the spokesperson for the Party of Independents of Lanzarote (PIL), Gladys Acuña, on the radio program Buenos Días Lanzarote, where she advanced her suspicions about the discovery of issues that could add more fuel to the burning fire that spread throughout the Island since 1998 when the Island Council decided to move forward with the revision of the Island Plan for Territorial Planning (PIOT), the measure that everyone knows as the tourist moratorium.
Acuña highlighted that it was last Wednesday when they began to study the impressive tome that makes up some documents that they cannot photocopy and whose content they have to extract by copying "with a pen" everything they deem necessary, a circumstance that, however, does not seem to motivate the abandonment of the three PIL councilors who are following the thread of what for many could be an unprecedented urban planning plot. "I have my notes taken, but don't worry, because I have a lot of patience and I don't get tired," she guaranteed. "It is a very dense documentation and we are seeing it non-stop all the time with the head of the Technical Office, without stopping to have a coffee, because we are not going there to waste time," she specified.
The first thing they have done, taking into account that it is the most current issue at the moment as a consequence of the resolution that Manuel Fajardo signed in the Island Council denying them the opening license, is to look at the file of the Papagayo Arena hotel. For the moment, what he knows is that the start of the works of this controversial establishment occurred "with an unfavorable report from the technicians".
Using her memory, because she did not have the papers in front of her, she indicated that the first report that was prepared on this establishment was in 1998, at which time the technicians of the southern Consistory unfavorably qualified the presentation of the project. According to her account, in 2000 it was again reported unfavorably for another series of reasons, until later, to her surprise, favorable reports began to appear from the City Council and the autonomous Government. Also from memory, she said that the project was modified at least twice. "The hotel has been open for four years," she recalled to focus on the importance that it had unfavorable reports until 2000. "There are things that catch my attention a lot, such as the fact that the technicians' reports went to the Government of the Canary Islands, knowing as we know that in 1998 the Minister of Tourism was Juan Carlos Becerra," she stressed. "Reports were coming from Las Palmas denying the project, among other things because the masonry plans were missing. It was like trying to mislead the fools, which caused me real astonishment," she said.
In any case, the PIL spokesperson and her other two colleagues are also looking at the rest of the works that have been done especially in Playa Blanca and each and every one of the licenses that have to do with them. In fact, she warned that there are cases that seem to be much worse than that of the Papagayo Arena. "I don't want to advance anything because I need to verify a piece of information with the Island Council, but we have requested reports on other works because we want to act on a serious matter," she asserted without wanting to delve further into the matter.
