Oswaldo Betancort arrived at the Cabildo with a commitment signed before a notary - emulating Dimas Martín in his best days - willing to solve Lanzarote's problems from the first moment.
That disposition that he showed was in vain when, from the first moment, exactly on the fourth day, he refused to recover two million of public money from Inalsa and the Water Consortium by ordering the lawyer who was carrying out the procedure to stop his activity and then tacitly desist from it. Then he raised his salary, intending to earn more than the President of Spain and giving the embarrassing spectacle of conducting a survey to ask if he should charge a lot, a lot or too much. A start that had nothing to do with the problems of Lanzarote but rather with the problems of Pedro San Ginés and his own.
If that was the first month, then came the months of occurrences and lies.
In my opinion, the biggest occurrence and lie to which he has subjected us during this year has been to repeat incessantly "not one more tourist, not one less tourist" while granting two new licenses for hotels and one for an apartment complex, thus contributing to the already existing tourist saturation suffered by the island. At the same time, he continues to deny the problem generated by the lack of regulation of vacation rentals, which has caused the excessive increase in the price of rentals of the few available homes.
I remember that around his second month in government, Oswaldo Betancort announced 90 million investment in water and the improvement of the supply service immediately. Another big lie. Water cuts on the island of Lanzarote are constant, water losses in the supply network are increasing and desalination plants are not working properly. And as if that were not enough, now Canal Gestión intends to revise upwards the conditions of the concession contract for the integral water cycle in Lanzarote, to charge us more for a service that it does not provide, with the complicit silence of Oswaldo Betancort.
Where I do have to recognize that there have been important advances is in the area of parties in terms of spending. The spending of the Saborea of the year 2023 doubled that of the previous year and the economic contributions for the parties of the municipality of Arrecife have also increased. They have increased so much that we have a permanent stage on the athletics track of the Sports City, to which you can now go to concerts but not to do sports.
In short, Oswaldo Betancort in his first year of government has demonstrated a total absence of island project and one occurrence after another to get by while squandering and unprotected the money of the inhabitants of the island.
It has been a lost first year, but what is really worrying is that there are no signs that the remaining three will not be a new disappointment.
