This Friday, the first session of the Board of Directors of the Port Authority of Las Palmas (APLP) was held under the mandate of Emilio Mayoral. With respect to Lanzarote, with respect to its main port, that of ...
This Friday, the first session of the Board of Directors of the Port Authority of Las Palmas (APLP) was held under the mandate of Emilio Mayoral. With respect to Lanzarote, with respect to its main port, Arrecife, the meeting served little more than to endorse the ruling of the winning project of the Port-City project.
One of the two political representatives who go through the Island, the first vice president of the Cabildo, Manuel Fajardo, told this newspaper after the meeting that with the arrival of Mayoral and the replacement of José Manuel Arnáiz, new times will come for the capital's port. We have no reason to doubt the optimism of the general secretary of the Lanzarote socialists. However, Lanzarote has been enduring the constant neglect of the Port Authority of Las Palmas for so many years that it is difficult to believe any promise of change that may be made.
It must be taken into account that the abandonment of the port of Arrecife is total and absolute. You only have to think about the complaint made this week by the president of the Association of Consignees, Tomás Fajardo, who perfectly described the reality that is experienced in the port area after the passage of the blessed Delta.
It would have been an important gesture of the change that the socialists are now advocating that Mayoral and company had assumed in this first meeting of the Board of Directors of the new era some serious and firm commitment that had to do with the immediate arrival of the measures that should serve to alleviate the numerous shortcomings that the port has been dragging for some time.
It has not been like that, and both he and María Isabel Déniz, mayor of the capital's City Council, have returned from Las Palmas practically with the same thing they came with. In the absence of official confirmation, it seems that even issues as important as the controversial concession of a second crane to a company that, things that Arnáiz's management had, had lost the public tender for awarding; it seems that the controversy that arose with the possible installation of that museum-bar-boat that was intended to be installed in the old commercial dock was not addressed either; it seems that such an important issue as the precarious situation of the cruise ship dock was not addressed either; not even something as simple to solve as increasing the power of water supply for ships that dock with difficulty in the current dock...
All these things were not discussed, and the feeling remained in the environment, at least that is how they have transmitted it to us, that there is still a long way to go for things to really change.
Lanzarote has the opportunity to make the miracle possible. It should not be forgotten that in addition to the first vice president of the Cabildo and the mayor of Arrecife, there is now the participation of the Minister of Tourism of the Government of the Canary Islands, Manuel Fajardo Feo, who already intervened in this first meeting to ask Mayoral and company to start looking less at La Luz and a little more at Arrecife and Puerto del Rosario, which evidently have a smaller operating account but a historical debt difficult to alleviate in less than twenty or thirty years.
We will have to continue giving a vote of confidence to the new managers, who, by the way, seem to have found an economic hole as big as the one in the ozone layer. The vote of confidence, yes, has an expiration date, and not too generous.
