To mark World Water Day, celebrated this Sunday, March 22nd, under the slogan "Water and Sustainable Development", it is essential to remember the significance and importance, surely never sufficiently highlighted, of this precious and vital natural resource for Lanzarote. It is so important that without drinking water, this island would not have reached the level of progress and quality of life that we enjoy today. The day that the people of Lanzarote, after centuries of hard work and struggle to obtain the precious water resource on an island as beautiful as it is dry and arid, were able to perform the simple gesture of opening a tap that poured drinking water, marked a before and after and represented a historical milestone of incalculable proportions. Since the mid-1960s, when the Rijo brothers - to whom Lanzarote will never be sufficiently grateful - installed the first land-based desalination plant in Europe on this island, Lanzarote began to emerge from its secular backwardness and allowed the gradual advancement and subsequent development of our tourism industry, the main economic engine and progress of this island.
But since then, as in everything, this qualitative leap forward that brought so many benefits to the island, also brought with it its own pathologies and the public company Inalsa, responsible for managing no less than a monopoly, the production and distribution of water for all the people of Lanzarote, which should have been a model of public exploitation generating economic surplus to redistribute resources in the form of social action among all the people of Lanzarote, ended up lamentably and incredibly in the opposite: mired in bankruptcy after decades of terrible management - not to call it in a harsher way - by the successive political leaders who were in charge. Inalsa ended up in ruin with no less than 50 million euros of debt behind it, desalination plants and completely outdated pipes, losses in the network of 50% of the treated water produced and constant supply cuts, endangering the hydraulic supply to both our tourism industry and the population and causing occasional water emergency situations.
A shame and an absurdity of such magnitude that even today it is difficult to understand that all the political formations of this island in the opposition - with the mediocre attitude of the PP that has described the award to a company controlled by them in the Community of Madrid as a bonanza; with the outdated and false debates of Alternativa Ciudadana around a supposed defense of the public; but above all and especially with the hypocritical attitude of the same parties responsible and directly causing the ruin of a company owned by all the people of Lanzarote, that is, the PIL and PSOE - can have the nerve and cynicism, and why not say it, the shamelessness, to fuel dark suspicions about the arrival of Canal Gestión in Lanzarote, which has come to shed light where there were only shadows. A company of professional solidity and sufficiently accredited economic solvency that, after an impeccable and irreproachable award process through a negotiated procedure with publicity strictly adjusted to legality, has undoubtedly been a great luck for all the people of Lanzarote that in 2013 it took over the reins of the integral water cycle in Lanzarote, putting on the table more than 100 million euros, 54 for investments in the whole island only in the first five years of the thirty in which it will develop its mission and paying the amount of 50 million euros that was owed to creditors.
Thus, no matter how hard they try to lie, the truth is that no one will be able to question that from CC, together with some councilors belonging to the most responsible and sensible wing of the PSOE, which fortunately we have had as government partners in recent years, we have solved the problem of the integral water cycle and the debt that weighed on Inalsa and that therefore threatened subsidiarily the public administrations that make up the Water Consortium. Say what they say, the undeniable fact is that last year Canal Gestión committed more than 23 million euros in works, 67% more than the just over 13 million initially announced, of which more than five million were certified and plans to execute and certify more than 35 million euros before the end of 2015.
These figures provide ample arguments to describe the arrival of Canal Gestión to the island as a fortune for Lanzarote, as it has not only solved the economic problem, but is currently providing direct employment through subcontractors to more than one hundred people, in addition to the economic revitalization and boost it represents for the suppliers of the latter. This is what I think and this is corroborated by the population of Lanzarote, who in a recent survey on the satisfaction of subscribers in relation to the current water management in Lanzarote gives almost a remarkable grade to both Canal Gestión and the service it has been providing for just over a year and a half, which indicates that citizens are positively assessing the management of the company - as it could not be otherwise after more than five years of permanent water cuts that have been completely eliminated to this day, and a deficient service in a single office when today there are branches in almost all the municipalities of the island - Canal Gestión has achieved the trust that its predecessor, Inalsa, did not have, a paradigm of incapacity and an example that will go down in the annals of history of what a public manager should never do.
For all this, and for many more reasons that it is impossible to summarize in a few lines, I frankly confess that one is still surprised and does not get used to the fact that the rest of the political formations can put "buts" to the management formula that solves what some of them destroyed and gives a solution to what others, diverting attention with unviable populism, would be unable to do. However, now that the past has been resolved, it is a matter of looking ahead and facing the future of this island with ambition and optimism, establishing solid foundations for what may perhaps be our greatest future challenge in the medium and long term from now on. And it is that with the outsourcing of the integral water cycle an economic scenario has been opened that will allow us to undertake, initially with powerful investments that are neither smoke nor fictitious - there are the financial records with their corresponding allocations against the demagogic arguments of the opposition - the path of change of the energy model so that Lanzarote in just 5 or 6 years produces 20% of its energy with clean energy, and from here to 30 years, why not, this island is 100% sustainable. An exciting and achievable goal that is fully in line with the slogan "Water and Sustainable Development" with which this year's World Water Day has been commemorated. Will they find something wrong with this too?.
Pedro M. San Ginés Gutiérrez is the president of the Cabildo de Lanzarote
