The Government is willing to unblock the pending economic transfers corresponding to the third additional provision of the Statute, but with a non-negotiable condition: to know the specific works to which they will be allocated to guarantee that they are dedicated to infrastructure and not to something else. “The Generalitat must designate which are the investments to which it intends to allocate the more than 700 million. It is money that must be invested in that, anything else is not logical”, said the Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez, yesterday during her participation in a meeting organized by the New Economy Forum, in which she urged the members of the Government to recover existing workspaces to talk on a technical level.
An example is the negotiations that have been taking place for weeks on the North ring road project (B-40) between Sabadell and Terrassa. Convinced that there will be an agreement sooner rather than later to be able to start drafting the project, Sánchez hopes that no one’s legs will give way at the moment of truth: “We cannot make the public pay the cost of political indecision and the lack of of courage, you have to withstand the spotlights and the pressure of groups that are not thinking about the general interestâ€.
The minister would like to transfer this dialogue to other issues: “There is no need for special summits, we already have a working group to talk about Rodalies, why don’t we get together?” In this sense, he made it clear that it is possible to talk about specific measures such as improving the service in Lleida, responding to the request that the Minister of Territories, Juli Fernà ndez, launched in an interview in La Vanguardia last Sunday: “Let’s sit in a table, let’s define the cost and do it, but for this a program contract is necessary that the Generalitat has not wanted to sign for five yearsâ€.
What Raquel Sánchez is not willing to talk about is the full transfer that the Generalitat is demanding because “the general interest rail network cannot be transferred to the autonomous communities.”
