The party summit on the drought, convened for this Friday by President Pere Aragonès, will have the mission of establishing a political consensus around the emergency measures to be adopted in Catalonia and the sanctioning regime that weighs on municipalities that fail to comply with the limitations. The main opposition parties have already informed the Government that the political consensus is to postpone, or directly eliminate, these fines, a demand that has the support of the Catalan municipalities.
The pressure for the Catalan Executive to bend to attenuate this sanctioning regime is maximum. If the Government wants to see an emergency decree on the drought approved definitively, it must agree to the demands of the opposition, which was joined yesterday by the Catalan Association of Municipalities (ACM). The municipal entity chaired by Lluís Soler (PDECat) called for a “bilateral” negotiation for the adoption of measures that help alleviate the drought, but with which “the municipalities are not penalized.”
Yesterday, the ACM expressed their displeasure at the fact that they had not been invited to the water summit that will take place this afternoon at the Palau de la Generalitat, to which all the parliamentary groups, except Vox, as well as the Agency, have been invited Catalana de l’Aigua (ACA) and the Meteorological Service of Catalonia. “We would have liked to be called to this summit”, said Soler during the presentation of the management report for the 2019-2023 mandate.
But the entity, which has traditionally included the town councils governed by the CiU and ERC, but which today integrates 100% of the municipalities of Catalonia, denounced both the Government’s protocol with this meeting and its attitude towards the municipalities in terms of drought. Soler regretted that when the Catalan Executive announced the intention to approve an emergency decree, it did not explain the sanctioning regime that it included, fines that the entity deplores: “We cannot penalize the municipalities,” Soler alleged.
The leader considered that local governments “have to be accompanied” and, despite the emergency situation in Catalonia, “this does not mean saying yes to everything”, but “deciding among all and listening to all”. The bilaterality that Soler claims translates into “taking into account the municipalities, which are the main and first step of the citizenry.”
The ACM’s demand is in line with those already expressed by other municipal entities such as the Associació de Municipis de l’Arc Metropolità, which includes large cities in the Barcelona metropolitan region such as Sabadell or Mataró. The entity chaired by Marta Farrés (PSC) denounced on Thursday that “all the pressure cannot be put on the town halls” and asked the Government to be able to fill the municipal swimming pools this summer so that they “act as climate refuges.”
