The war on the terraces intensifies. Restaurateurs from Ciutat Vella accused of repeatedly failing to comply with the regulations are hiding their nightstands so that the City Council can take them away. They are not going to even confiscate their stoves. Vaudeville broke out around nine in the morning this Wednesday. Members of the municipal legal services, agents of the Urban Police, a few workers and a couple of trucks stood in front of the well-known El Rincón del Artista and in a very meticulous way dismantled and labeled each of the elements of their pedestal.
“With hammers and saws,” says the lawyer of this joint on Nou de la Rambla street, Eudald Lligoña. They have even taken out the wooden pallet… The normal thing is that they give you a few days’ notice and give you the opportunity to defend yourself. I immediately alerted the others, and many hid their terraces, so that the City Council would not take them away. There are many jobs at stake. It is an illegal persecution. “The government of Mayor Jaume Collboni is breaking the rules.”
That of El Rincón del Artista is one of those 33 files for the removal of terraces due to repeated non-compliance with the ordinance opened by the Ciutat Vella district the previous term and which ultimately expired because their deadlines were exhausted, the same as the deputy mayor. of Security and councilor responsible for this side of the city, Albert Batlle, assured that he would recover after a good part of the opposition denounced this example of administrative inefficiency.
After reviewing the criteria and establishing the minimum infractions to lose the license at seven instead of five, the number of watchmen designated by the district remained at 24. “We are talking about sanctions for 2022,” adds the lawyer for the majority of these businesses, Lligona–. Despite them, the City Council gave the permits for last year. With BComú the limit was five sanctions and with the PSC, seven. Furthermore, the City Council is not applying the same criteria throughout the city. And all this is in the courts, and the judge has already said that while the procedure lasts, the City Council cannot take the tables.”
The City Council only confirmed this Wednesday the removal of the El Rincón del Artista terrace. And he did not clarify if his entourage found in other cases that the restaurateurs had hidden their nightstands. In any case, these days, as many as necessary, the procession will once again approach the indicated establishments, until dismantling their lamps. “This year – municipal sources abound – the City Council opened new files, detected new non-compliance. The mechanism of not renewing the license is provided for in the terrace ordinance in cases in which a sanctioning procedure has been initiated for repeated non-compliance or for serious or very serious misconduct.
We are witnessing the latest episode of the crossfire between the City Council, many entities and a good part of the restoration. Also this Wednesday, the Federació d’Associacions de Veïns de Barcelona (Favb) denounced that with the new rate, restaurateurs will pay less than before the pandemic, a privilege that the Favb sees as unjustifiable, taking into account the situation in other sectors. The truth is that trenches are rising everywhere. Recently, about a hundred businesses in Raval and Gòtic celebrated the fact that the City Council had no choice but to withdraw the restrictions imposed in the previous mandate. The municipal legal services saw that due to some formal defects they had lost the administrative dispute that the Gremi de Restauració had brought against them.
