These days we are witnessing the governmental farce raised to its maximum power in the city of Arrecife. Chaos: this is how the current situation of the capital of Lanzarote could be defined, caused by a City Council without technicians, with a government team headed by the socialist mayor, Eva de Anta, more than five years as councilor for Social Services and one year as the highest responsible for the City Council of the third capital of the Canary Islands.
Arrecife is today a city mired in serious economic losses for its merchants, in a terrible traffic collapse and absolute lack of parking, a dirty city, without order, in which traffic lights either work, or maybe not, and in which, disastrous lawsuits aside, the institution closest to the neighbor and that must ensure their well-being has rulers like Eva de Anta, with ideas such as locating the new Argana health center in the neighborhood's sports hall, which by the way has been closed for years and is part of another of the curious pieces that the socialists left us in Arrecife with their brilliant management in Sports.
Incompetence, neglect, carelessness, negligence,… Can anyone think of worse decisions than those adopted in this first year of Government by the mayor of Arrecife? Not even training, using a sports simile. From the senselessness of the closure of the Maritime Avenue, whose popular consultation is neither here nor expected, to the serious problem of housing that, if not resolved, will sooner rather than later turn the city into the new Ibiza of doctors staying overnight in cars or cabins in order to occupy the designated place. There is no rental available. None. The price of housing in Arrecife grows well above the Canary Islands average. Everyone signed up for vacation rentals and, meanwhile, those affected are camping in the City Council itself asking for solutions from a mayor who has been branded as a liar and unsympathetic up to three times this week and who has denied what was evidenced by the Government of the Canary Islands, that Arrecife does indeed have free and empty homes, but that the City Council has not wanted to or has not known how to deliver them to the most needy people and families. Deplorable! But then the PSOE champions human rights and is the champion of social services. Sure, sure.
After the moment of the tourist mini-train, the agents of the Local Police have received instructions from their chief councilor to control any vehicle that enters through an area that, on the way to the year of its opening, is still restricted to road traffic. Judging by the bloodletting of fines this week in these rigorous controls, after the information period, the closure measure is not being respected or known in most cases either.
And all despite the fact that the majority of the City Council Plenary approved the reopening of the Avenue to traffic, a decision also demanded by two of the groups that support a pact that was about to fall apart, Coalición Canaria and Partido de Independientes de Lanzarote. A more than stubborn, undemocratic and ill-advised? mayor refuses to comply with the requirement of the Corporation's plenary session. Of course she has, and therefore will have, an illustrious advisor such as the great ideologue Carlos Espino. The excuse for not opening it continues to be, as the socialist mayor, Eva de Anta, has defended on numerous occasions, that she is waiting for a technical report that never arrives nor is expected to arrive.
In addition to the economic damage that it is causing to merchants, with a third of establishments disappearing because they cannot withstand such agony, now the closure of the Avenue also affects the Yacht Club, the Arrecife Gran Hotel and the tourists who come to visit and do their shopping trusting to find a capital at the height of this island Biosphere Reserve, but who find a city that can be described as everything but "friendly", as the mayor invents. By order of the mayor and with threat of sanction, neither the members of the former, nor the clients of the latter, nor the angry third parties, will be able to transit through the Avenue. Nor to approach to pick up or drop off a client at the door of the Gran Hotel. Fundraising zeal or compulsive obsession of the mayor? Now she forces members and tourists to access her premises by walking or through the underground parking, when for decades these entities have had their own parking. The arm wrestling that Doña Eva de Anta seems to want to play with her government partners, the opposition and the citizens of Arrecife is killing the heart of the city.
Without a mobility plan, without alternatives for pedestrianization [a desirable trend on the other hand, but only when possible], with fewer and fewer public parking spaces and with merchants fed up, it is difficult to defend a plan that the mayor seems to have set as a roadmap.
As there are few demands on Health in Lanzarote, the Government of this city now proposes to provisionally locate the Argana health center in the Sports Hall. Show some respect for your fellow citizens, Madam Mayor! Is that really what you think your neighbors deserve? What have we done to you to be treated like this? You could at least attend to the repeated requests from neighbors, groups and other entities such as the Yacht Club to request an audience. Listen to the citizens, Madam Mayor. Not to those who approach you with the usual opportunism.
The city is becoming unsafe and smells bad. Meanwhile, the Senior Center remains closed, the City Council allows a regrettable treatment by the private home care company and the municipal Social Services are inoperative. Stench. And more dirt, no matter how much Tomás Fajardo [another defender of the autonomy of the Port of Arrecife and if I saw you I don't remember], the mayoress and Urbaser sell us with photos that story that nobody believes anymore.
This week, even the residents of the center of Arrecife have registered writings in the City Council denouncing the deplorable state of abandonment in which the city center itself is located. Among other deficiencies, they cite the poor condition of the sidewalks, the lack of pedestrian crossings, the deficient state of road signs, the precarious state of the sanitation network and canalizations in general, the null or minimal maintenance of streetlights, the rebound of insecurity in the area, the lack of parking and the deficient cleaning. The PP does not say it. The neighbors, the merchants, the tourists, businessmen, groups,… say it. And while the mayor is angry because she was not invited to an act of the PP in Arrecife, …
From the PP we propose alternatives to the problem of the Avenue: square traffic lights, intermittent bollards, the definitive opening to traffic of the Avenue itself, allowing circulation only at certain times…. Dynamizing the city was not easy, but the socialists can take example from the work that Cándido Reguera developed in his day. To solve the rest of the problems, we again demand a change of political color in this City Council, to address the current challenges of the capital all that is needed is something that this government team lacks, the desire to work.
As in the story of that king who only saw what he wanted to see, everyone but the mayor seems to show the decline of this wonderful city drowned in a circulatory chaos. Only by a personal whim of a councilor who reached the mayor's office by rebound and perhaps and only perhaps is not up to the circumstances of a city that drowns in the neglect of this government team. Dear Eva de Anta, you are condemning all the people of Arrecife, with this closure of the Maritime Avenue, to see with resignation that Arrecife is becoming the "chronicle of a death foretold".
By David Rodríguez, former PP councilor in the Arrecife City Council
