And the grotesque arrived in Lanzarote

One of the first measures approved by the new president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote has been to raise his salary, and he has not done so in a moderate way, but almost doubling the previous one. The truth is that it is very good to be the owner of your own salary, I wonder how many templates would want that ease to agree on the improvement of their agreements.

Almost 93,000 euros a year is not bad. Especially considering that it is a higher figure than what the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, earns, and what I myself received as island president. As soon as he landed, he grants the citizens of Lanzarote, as a democratic champion, the "privilege" of deciding whether to raise his salary between 87,000 and 104,000 euros, with up to four options between the two amounts. 

This excessive increase would place Oswaldo Betancort's salary at 92,928 euros, and would exceed the salary of the President of the Government of Spain by 3,000 euros.

If someone whose party supports the theses of their government partners in many of the public institutions of this country, who consider a minimum salary of 14,000 euros dangerous for the national economy, receives it, there would be much to talk about and think about. 

After announcing these days in the island Plenary that he would submit this salary increase to a 48-hour popular consultation through the Data Center of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, now, after the scandal in which he has been involved, he retracts and announces that he will change it for a telephone survey of 300 residents of the island.

A change of criteria that is also due to the fact that from the PSOE we registered a request for information on the regulations that protect this type of consultation, and which is the competent body to carry it out. We have also requested information on the term and mechanism of the call, as well as what are the control elements that allow guaranteeing the absence of any alteration of its results.

Faced with this, Betancort has been forced to continue with his strategy of permanent flight, and has resorted to the criteria of alleged experts to try to justify his scandalous salary increase with a telephone survey.

No popular consultation is necessary. Let him put the same salary as the previous one, with a reasonable increase, and he will not have to complain about the criticisms received in the street and in the entire national press.

It is said that the work of a public representative is very important, and that a consideration such as the one that Oswaldo Betancort intends to self-assign is appropriate to the responsibility of governing the destinies of our island. By comparison, we could say that Pedro Sánchez's 90,000 euros are a trifle, because an entire country depends on him.

It shows that his stipend for representing the citizens of Lanzarote is not enough for what he and his party consider his merits. 

That consultation is a scandal and a grotesque. Not only because the citizens of Lanzarote are treated as ignorant. First, they pull an unnecessary reform out of their sleeves, pure waste, simply for the interests of a leader in need of inventions, and then, so that people believe that the Island Council is interested in their opinion, they propose a popular consultation in which you have to choose between three options.

It is already insane that as soon as they arrive in office, they decide on issues of this type as the first ones that our neighbors need. A shameful spectacle that the president is starring in just 20 days after taking office. What CC does is petty populism. 

María Dolores Corujo

General Secretary of the PSOE in Lanzarote

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