The Yaiza City Council announced on Wednesday morning that it will request an extraordinary assembly from the Lanzarote Water Consortium due to the public institution's "lack of information" regarding the status of the proceedings for the termination of the contract for the integral water cycle. At the beginning of June, the President of the Water Consortium, Oswaldo Betancort (CC), and the Cabildo's Water Councilor, Domingo Cejas (CC), took over the management of the integral water cycle from Canal Gestión Lanzarote after detecting "serious breaches" in the service.
The southern municipality has reported that it has repeatedly requested information, along with the socialist city councils of Tías, San Bartolomé, and Haría, regarding the documentation for the contract termination, but has not received a response.
The mayor of Yaiza, Óscar Noda, has sent a new letter to the President of the Insular Water Consortium, Oswaldo Betancort, urgently requesting "detailed information on the procedures for intervention in the service and contract termination".
In this letter, he also criticizes him for continuing to learn about the steps and actions taken by his management through the media. Noda demands "transparency and access to information" as stipulated in the Consortium's statutes, "essential obligations for any public administration, and even more so when the decisions made may have legal, economic, and patrimonial repercussions for all entities that make up the consortium".
Legal reports, legal actions by Canal Gestión, and communications with the company
Among the documentation requested by the Consortium are the updated technical-legal reports on both proceedings, the possible actions taken by Canal Gestión, the communications between the company and the Consortium, the request for precautionary measures announced by the concessionaire, the allegations presented in the proceedings, and the organizational chart resulting from the intervention of the service, including the description of the positions created, assigned functions, and designated responsible parties for this purpose.
Óscar Noda reminds Betancort that the mayors unanimously backed the definitive resolution of the contract with Canal Gestión given the need to act in the face of the serious supply problems and continuous water cuts that the island had been suffering. However, he believes that this decision was adopted relying on the information and guarantees offered by the Presidency of the Consortium, "without the city councils having sufficient time to thoroughly analyze all the documentation linked to such a significant measure."
“The mayors acted with responsibility and good faith because we understood that it was necessary to make decisions to try to improve a service that had been generating problems for citizens for too long. But that trust must now be met with a response in the form of absolute transparency and access to all the documentation we have requested,” says the mayor.
Noda also states that “it is a democratic anomaly that the president of the Insular Water Consortium, and president of the Cabildo de Lanzarote, Oswaldo Betancort, refuses to provide the required information." "This is not an exclusive concern of the Yaiza City Council; four city councils have been demanding information for months without obtaining sufficient answers," he continues.
The southern leader adds that "the consortium members have the right to know all the details of a procedure that could have important consequences for public coffers and for the future management of water in Lanzarote. Transparency cannot depend on the political will of whoever presides over the Consortium; it is a democratic and legal obligation."
The mayor adds that “the service has been rescued, but we continue to suffer water cuts in different parts of the island, uncertainty about future management persists, and warnings from Canal Gestión regarding possible claims and millionaire indemnities that could affect the Consortium and, by extension, all the consortium member city councils, continue to hover.”
Therefore, Yaiza understands that this shared concern evidences the need to convene an extraordinary body with the objective that the Presidency "informs all consortium members in detail about the status of the procedures", the actions taken to date, the existing risks, and the future management forecasts for the Integral Water Cycle, thus guaranteeing the right to information that all city councils integrated into the organization possess and reinforcing transparency in the management of a matter of maximum public interest.
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