The executive vice president of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB), Antonio Balmón, starred this Tuesday in the first conference of the year of the RethinkBCN cycle and used the Foment del Treball stage to publicly present the major objectives for the next two years in the metropolitan administration: “The two major agreements that are needed are in housing and mobility. If this works between now and the middle of the mandate, we will open other spaces for reflection,” he noted.
These are challenges that the AMB has been working on for years, but the mayor of Cornellà de Llobregat also wants to reach great agreements from a broad point of view, generating shared roadmaps between the public sector, the private sector and civil society.
The veteran politician said these words from the experience of forging transversal governments – in the AMB he leads the PSC together with the communes, ERC and Junts – and of creating experiences of public-private collaboration, such as the metropolitan housing operator Habitatge Metròpolis Barcelona (HBM ) or the mixed company Aigües de Barcelona.
The executive vice president of the AMB reported that there are “internal transfers of the population looking for rental or ownership housing.” According to Balmón, now is the time to “accelerate, but not only in construction, also in the field of rehabilitation and reuse of the existing park and in other tax policies and economic contributions, in aid and subsidies.” The socialist promised to “speak with everyone, promoters, entities and civil society” to define housing policies. At the same time, he acknowledged that starting HBM “cost a lot.”
The AMB was the promoter of the controversial Low Emission Zones (ZBE). “We anticipated and gave answers. With errors that justice made us rectify. But nothing happens. There are always errors, but also certainties,” Balmón recalled. “We do not want to attack the private car, we want to organize all mobility,” he added.
His prescription for the next two years is to “act without ideological prejudices.” “We agree that we have a problem; and we agree that part of the answer is public mobility and sustainable mobility to reduce private mobility. From here, let’s create a space with all the actors to reach agreements,” she argued. Furthermore, Balmón assured that we must “start considering” the incorporation of the private sector into this management.
In his conference, titled The Metropolis of Answers, the executive vice president of the AMB reviewed several other topics. For example, he defended that immigration is “a factor of stability.” “The other day I visited a school in the Sant Ildefons neighborhood of Cornellà with a large percentage of non-native students. Their claims are to have a more orderly and safe neighborhood. “Who says immigration equals crime?” he asked. “Some political force uses trompe l’oeil to erode coexistence,” he concluded.
Regarding the debate on the metropolitan structure, Antonio Balmón explained once more that according to him now is the time to consolidate the structure and not to expand the AMB to more municipalities.
