Is a government pact with the communes of Ada Colau compatible that would lighten the management burden of a government with only 10 councillors, with the possibility of carrying out important projects with other municipal groups? When the results of the general elections are known tonight and an end to a provisional period that has reduced the public agenda of the mayor and his team to a minimum, Jaume Collboni will begin to have the necessary information to answer this question in one way or another.
Tomorrow the mayor of Barcelona will start a round of institutional meetings with the leaders of all the municipal groups with the exception of Vox. With some he has already maintained more informal contacts during the previous weeks. Its current purpose is to tempt the willingness of some to explore city agreements. In addition to overseeing the negotiation of the first budgets of his mandate, Jaume Collboni will measure the options to close, already during the first months of this new stage at the Barcelona City Council, agreements on issues that, in principle, should not pose many obstacles. The first could be a pact to continue and speed up as much as possible the coverage of the Dalt round, in the style of the Glòries pact.
The mayor, who was inaugurated on June 17, has put on the table in recent weeks two folders that were part of his electoral program, initiatives that will also require the support of other groups to prosper. And on both issues getting the votes of the commons seems very difficult, unless there are many concessions and the two sides are able to find enough compensations to agree. One of these is the downward revision of the rule that requires 30% of new developments or renovations to be set aside for social housing. The other, which the mayor talks about repeatedly, is the modification of the ordinance on coexistence in public space.
From the proposal of the PSC, which the deputy mayor of Security, Albert Batlle, and the legal service of the City Council have begun to elaborate, it has transpired, through the mouth of the mayor himself, that the penalties for some uncivil behavior will be toughened. However, the problem is not so much in the amount of the fines, but in the fact that most of them are not collected. Does it make sense, for example, not to touch on the chapter dedicated to street vending, when in recent years barely 1.2% of the fines imposed on street vendors have reached the municipal coffers? It is a stigma, that of wet paper, that has accompanied this regulation approved during the time of Mayor Joan Clos from the first minute.
While the way is once again being sought to make these sanctions really effective, the municipal government is ready to promote another path of penance provided for by the same ordinance, but very little traveled, that of alternative measures to the financial fine that bring a benefit to the community and offer a wider and more easily accessible catalog of benefits.
The socialists want the new civics ordinance to establish more clearly than in the current text the rights and duties of citizens, for the regulation to be “an expression of democratic authority” and to be applied through prevention, education, communication and, above all, without the authority’s pulse trembling when sanctioning.
They also want to include in the revised text aspects that are out of date for the simple fact that they did not exist or had little impact on the deterioration of coexistence in public space, issues related to mobility or cleaning, which in many cases are disseminated by other normative texts of the City Council. An example, the uncivil behavior of cyclists and skaters.
Among the ideas of the PSC to promote a civility questioned by the unsupportive behavior of many foreigners and natives, there are those of continuing to develop a permanent campaign on rights and obligations in which as much information as necessary is given on the most infringed rules and the punishment that entails violating them. The Office of Coexistence will depend directly on the Prevention and Security area. And an almost impossible mission considering the lack of response from the regional administration to the demands of previous mayors: that the Generalitat provide the tools, the financial resources and the personnel (police officers) to guarantee coexistence in the public space. Also, the socialist government, which keeps intact its will to create the figure of the “night mayor” and provide it with means, proposes to rethink – along the lines of strengthening it – the role of civic agents.
Achieving agreements on the rules that must govern coexistence in an increasingly saturated, contested and conflictual public space and the sanctions that must be imposed on violators has always been an extremely complex operation at Barcelona City Council. The approval of the civics ordinance (December 23, 2005) left cracks in the governing alliance between the PSC and its minority partners in Iniciativa per Catalunya. The predecessors of BComú unsuccessfully opposed the fact that prostitution and begging were included in those regulations. Later, an attempt to revise downwards that text, orchestrated by councilor Jaume Asens in Ada Colau’s first term, crashed against a wall erected due to the lack of consensus. In the second term, the deep differences between the communes and the socialists dynamited any further attempts.
With these precedents, the possibility of an agreement on this sensitive matter between the PSC and BComú is almost nil, especially when the formation chaired by Ada Colau has already warned its former members that it is not prepared to swallow a tightening of sanctions, that its bet is rather the opposite.
So, the socialists look the other way and see the group still led by ex-mayor Xavier Trias. As with the review of the obligation to allocate 30% of new developments and major renovations to affordable housing, the affinity between the two formations that occupied the first two positions in the May 28 elections is more than obvious.
The addition of the 11 councilors from Junts to the 10 from the PSC would guarantee the approval of the amendment to the ordinance (it also does not seem complicated to add the 4 councilors from the PP to this majority), but it would make a governing pact between Collboni and Colau (with or without the ex-mayor) at the Barcelona City Council quite complicated. The commons, through the mediation of the former mayor of Urbanism, Janet Sanz, have warned their former partners this week that they can forget variable arithmetic, that Ada Colau’s party does not conceive of any other way to govern the city than through an alliance of the left and that, to reach excellence, this understanding should include the Republican Left. Today this option seems completely unlikely, although tomorrow, once the verdict of the polls is known, things could start to change.
