Surely you have said to yourself, "there should be elections every year" in reference to the number of projects that are executed in the year before the elections. And in part you are right, but allow me to explain, because I understand that it makes a lot of sense that this is the case.
When we start a legislature, the lines of action of the main projects that will be carried out throughout it are marked. The phases are more or less these: plan, project, award and execute; and in this order, we cannot execute without awarding and we cannot project without having planned beforehand.
That has to be the sequence and it cannot be otherwise. In such a way that with more or less deviation - and with the exception of the projects inherited from the previous mandate, which in my case are many - in the first year we plan what we are going to do, in the second the technicians project, in the third the award procedure is carried out and in the fourth, in general, the works begin, coinciding with the pre-election year.
That is why I maintain how logical it is that projects accumulate at the end of each term in any public administration, beyond the effective electoral interest that some of us have, and the need and even obligation we have to give public accounts of our management.
What do we do if not? Do we paralyze all projects in the face of the imminent electoral campaign and the fear of that criticism? Well, no, honestly I don't think that is the way forward or what is most convenient for the hackneyed "general interest", hence the "part of the reason".
Unfortunately, electoral memory is fragile and short-term. Does anyone remember the projects we launched in 2016 or 2017 for example? Probably when you go to exercise your right to vote you will only remember what was done in the last stretch of the mandate and the opposition will try to minimize everything before, while trying to exploit this widespread feeling that things only appear to be done when elections are approaching, even if it is not entirely fair for what has been said. But this has always been the case and it is not going to change now, just as our determination to continue with all the projects until the last minute of the mandate is not going to change and we are also going to tell about it.
I am not going to bore you now with details of the extensive balance of the many challenges and difficulties that the Island had and we have overcome, such as the management of the integral water cycle, that of the Tourist Centers, the waste, the highest unemployment rate in Europe, the undoubted improvement in the social care network, the multiple investment plans for municipal cooperation, or the determined commitment to renewables. But we have much more to do, namely: end high unemployment, address the lack of public housing (although neither of these is the responsibility of the Cabildo), integrate policies, services and social actors, consolidate permanent island beautification plans, strengthen policies aimed at the primary sector and conservation of the agricultural landscape, ethnographic heritage, and all those actions that emanate from the Lanzarote 2020 strategy of the Biosphere Reserve, the guiding thread of the political action of the governments that I have been honored to preside over.
It has not been easy to manage in times of crisis and maximum difficulty, which have been 5 of the 9 years that I will be in the presidency on October 19. Now, when the situation has stabilized, when the institution and its public companies are healthy, when we have more determined support from the Government of the Canary Islands and the Canary Islands Development Funds are guaranteed, now we are in a position to finish the job and face large and ambitious strategic projects that would otherwise be unthinkable, including putting Arrecife, capital of the Biosphere Reserve, at the level that the city and Lanzarote deserve.
This must be and will be an unrenounceable priority, but for that we also need, in addition to the desired dialogue and aspiration for consensus, the firmness, courage and determination to assume the responsibility for which we presented ourselves and has been lacking in the political leadership of the capital. A leadership that has been and continues to be too influenced by external pressures that always found "useful agents" at the service of their interests, always alien to those of the citizens, precisely those who base their campaign on accusing Coalición Canaria Lanzarote of having spurious interests simply because we do not comply with what are only theirs.
We, until it is your turn to decide, will continue working with the same intensity as until today and without any symptoms of exhaustion, on the contrary, with renewed enthusiasm for the candidacy of Echedey Eugenio Felipe and his team to preside over the City Council of Arrecife, but we will talk about that another day. What we are not going to do - I insist in no way - is to paralyze any project no matter how many electoral appointments or citizen criticism there may be, among other things, because without a doubt doing so would be much worse, also for those who question everything.
By Pedro San Ginés, president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote
