The town councils grouped in the Federation of Municipalities of Catalonia (FMC) have intensified their demand for municipal swimming pools to be able to open this summer, a circumstance that current regulations practically veto due to the drought emergency. Specifically, the special drought plan prohibits filling and refilling public and private swimming pools, with the exception of federated sports facilities. If the regulations did not change, the use of municipal swimming pools could be very complicated.
The town councils attached to the FMC have sent their request to the Government so that municipal swimming pools can be filled and refilled so that they can be used normally in view of the forecast of high temperatures that will be reached in the summer period. Likewise, they demand a flexible interpretation of the concept “climate refuge” referring to swimming pools so that it goes beyond what has been considered until now by David Mascort, Minister of Climate Action. He declared a few weeks ago that, as a general rule, municipal pools cannot be filled, although he left the door open to studying exceptions if any facility can be classified as a climate refuge. He was referring to the fact that if a municipality has a library, reading room or spaces with air conditioning for cooling, these places could replace the municipal swimming pools as a climatic refuge, so they would remain closed so as not to waste water.
However, this criterion has been labeled “restrictive” by the FMC, whose president, Eduard Rivas, judges that it could be discriminatory and generate grievances between neighboring localities. “You cannot make a rule that is arbitrary and subjective,” he says. Rivas’s argument is that, in the case of nearby municipalities, with this criterion it could happen that some municipalities opened their municipal swimming pools and others did not. “This could cause a call effect from neighbors from other towns, which would result in saturated swimming pools, angry people and a climate refuge that in reality would not be such, but rather a crowded place,” warns Eduard Rivas. The FMC proposes an open interpretation to extend this exception to swimming pools that have a public character or use, although they are not necessarily municipal.
In the last monographic plenary session of the Parliament on the drought, the PSC presented various proposals so that municipal and community pools could be filled. The initiative was approved but in order to materialize, the special drought plan in charge of the Government must be modified, which must establish how this measure is carried out and specified. The socialist deputy Sílvia Paneque also believes that it would be acceptable to fill in community pools and the pools of tourist establishments (campsites or hotels) that have the support of an economic activity that justifies it.
“We believe that this measure is acceptable, since the impact that filling the pools would have on overall water consumption would be very small, we estimate that it would be between 1.5% and 2%. It is a small percentage,” explains Paneque. The socialists believe that these modifications are not substantial and the Government could approve them without going through Parliament’s ratification. What the PSC does not accept to fill or refill are private single-family pools in the strict sense.
The PSC has requested Mascort’s appearance in the Catalan Chamber to clarify the degree of execution of the other agreements adopted in the plenary session on the drought (aid to affected sectors, measures to promote the use of regenerated water in industry or the green light so that the town councils can award network improvement works by emergency means…).
THE FMC has demanded that the amount of sanctions provided for in the regulations for municipalities that exceed the water allocation established by the Government be substantially reduced.
