Open letter to the president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote

April 28 2020 (22:00 WEST)

Yes to the Unity and Reconstruction Pact, but without disqualification

Madam President of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, since March 20, Coalición Canaria has been making proposals in various fields, trying to collaborate with your government so that it succeeds in the measures to be adopted to address emergency situations and plan the economic recovery of Lanzarote. We have done so with all humility and vision, aware that we are the opposition and that our proposals may not be infallible, or even the best, even wrong, but it seems that the government focuses exclusively on the ERTE proposal in the CACT, as if this were the only one and also obeyed illegitimate interests.

But Madam President, to qualify as you did in a public press conference the proposals of the main opposition party - practically with the same citizen support as those who preside over the institution - as "settling of accounts", "vendettas", and "personal obsessions", does not seem the best way to lay the foundations for achieving the necessary and essential "Unity and Reconstruction Pact" that you paradoxically proclaim after such an unjustified attack. All of which, rather, portrays that the obsession is not precisely in me or in CC, and certainly points to the need to calm the tone of your responses if you really aspire to that unity and reconstruction pact for which, to this day, a month and a half has passed since the state of alarm was decreed without us being the object of the slightest consultation, or creation of a working group.

Because speaking of reasons and obsessions, it is necessary to remind you that to justify your resounding refusal to even study the proposal to propose an ERTE, you assured that these "are prohibited for public companies and that it could not be applied to the CACT staff because they are civil servants"; although now you assume that it can be done and that they are not civil servants, but they are studying - after a month and a half lost after the declaration of alarm - whether their legal-statutory link with the Cabildo would imply any impediment to materialize it.

Study it, Madam President, you should have already done it, but I beg you to abandon that disrespectful and inconsiderate attitude towards the thousands of citizens we represent, accept the outstretched hand of CC and do not make an ERTE, nor second any of the measures we propose if you do not consider them appropriate, but do not despise us in that way if you expect from us what we really want to do and Lanzarote needs, which is to support each other to overcome one of the most difficult moments we have faced as a society.

Madam President, the only argument I have heard worthy of clarification and explanation is when you argue that "the State is all of us." And certainly, it is. But we were also without the coronavirus crisis and I am going to explain the reason why the Congress of Deputies approved in 2015 a law that allows ERTEs in public companies if they are mostly fed by the market. And it is for a simple reason: all the companies in the country, whether private or public, that do not detract a single euro cent from the public treasury, contribute to the single state fund so that from that fund and by mere tax and fiscal justice is provided, among others, this collective coverage to all those who contribute, so that in the face of a momentary liquidity problem, they are allowed the temporary suspension of employment, not dismissal, until the situation normalizes.

That pretext of "the State is all of us" I admit that it may have some conceptual sense, but not legal impediment, if we were talking about state-owned companies (I do not know if there is any that is mostly fed by market income, although they could if there were and that is why the State urges them not to do so), because in such circumstances, after all, we would be talking about the same state fund. But this is not the case of the many companies and public entities that will be in the numerous local administrations of the country, which do not live from them, which pay their taxes and pay or generate local economy, which contribute resources to the state coffers to have the same right as the rest when it comes to it.

This is precisely the right that your government refuses to exercise so that it is the CACT or the Cabildo, instead of the State to whom it would correspond by legal protection and justice, who assumes those costs, thus detracting very important avoidable resources that the island will need like water in May, never better said, starting with the CACT.

Madam President, believe me when I tell you that if, for whatever reason, you do not share the approach we make from CC, nothing happens because both you and your government have the right to do what you consider best for both the island and the CACT, but we will try to continue helping them, raising what from our experience, capacity and knowledge we understand that best suits the "general interest", in the broadest sense and population spectrum, as would correspond to a responsible government. Among other things, because the proposal has been supported, or at least understood as a possible option to be valued by the president of the Popular Party, which supports you in the government, by the representative of Nueva Canarias on the island, with whom you also signed a pact and govern in Arrecife, by the spokesman of Podemos in the supposed opposition in the Island Council but in pact with the PSOE in several municipalities, and even by the representative of Intersindical Canaria, majority union in the Works Council of the CACT, which I do not think we are all protagonists of the same obsession.

In any case, and despite this, we will continue to wait for you with an outstretched hand.

 

Pedro San Ginés Gutiérrez. Spokesman for the Nationalist Group CC-PNC in the Cabildo of Lanzarote

 

 

Most read