The Casa Benito Pérez Armas in Yaiza hosted this Thursday a Training Day on Participatory Budgets with a double session, one more theoretical and the other focused on the practical part.
It had as guest speakers the councilor Inmaculada Fernández and the technician Luz Marina López, from the Citizen Participation Area of the municipality of Los Llanos de Aridane, on the island of La Palma, and Prisco Alfonso Navarro and Elisa Ramírez, their counterparts in the capital city council of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
The day, inaugurated by the southern councilor of Citizen Participation, Águeda Cedrés, began with the theoretical session in which the invited speakers unraveled "their experience and the main obstacles they had to overcome in their respective municipalities", firstly in the elaboration of the regulation and, secondly, those that appear later in the day to day with the implementation of participatory budgets, "such as the reception of projects, the technical aspects or the scales they use for the election of the same".
In this first part, in the form of a colloquium moderated by Alex Salebe, which could be viewed both on the Youtube channel and on the website of the Yaiza City Council, the speakers revealed "aspects of interest such as the methods used by each municipality to get the information to their neighbors or get their commitment, the different areas of the City Council that are involved, the steps they have followed for its implementation, the amount that is allocated to these participatory budgets or who can take part both in the presentation of projects and in the votes", among other issues of important scope.
The second part of the day was dedicated to the practical part, and to this were added, in a more active way, "the associations, individuals and technical staff of the Citizen Participation Area of Yaiza who followed the theoretical day attentively". This session focused on clarifying doubts, sharing different visions and seeing how to apply the methods used in the represented municipalities to the reality of Yaiza, with the aim of "avoiding falling into the same errors that due to ignorance or lack of foresight could be found in Los Llanos de Aridane or Las Palmas de Gran Canaria".
The guests agreed on the importance of the involvement and political commitment so that this project can go ahead, a commitment that Águeda ratified as responsible for the Area in Yaiza, highlighting that "it has and will have all the commitment, both on my part and on the part of the technical team of the area and of the entire government group headed by the mayor Óscar Noda", adding that "with the new regulation that is being developed, citizens, associations and groups will be able to vote on which projects to allocate an amount of the approved budget, projects that will result in the common good of the municipality."
Cedrés concluded the day thanking the collaboration of the invited speakers, especially the representatives of La Palma for the difficult moments that the island is going through since the volcanic eruption began and to whom she conveyed much encouragement and strength, and to all the citizens and groups that participated in this "streaming and debate workshop so creative that serves as an example of work".
Yaiza thus took with this training session one step further in its objective of launching "this important tool for citizen participation through its Active Citizenship strategy in Yaiza"
