Is a government pact compatible with the commons of Ada Colau that lightens the management burden of a government with only 10 councilors with the possibility of carrying out important projects with other municipal groups? When the results of the general elections are known tonight and a provisional period that has reduced the public agenda of the mayor and his team to a minimum is put to an end, Jaume Collboni will begin to have the necessary information to answer that question in one way or another.
Tomorrow, the mayor of Barcelona will begin a round of institutional meetings with the leaders of all the municipal groups with the exception of Vox. With several of them he has already maintained more informal contacts in the previous weeks. The purpose of his time is to test the willingness of each other to explore city agreements. In addition to scanning the horizon with a view to negotiating the first budgets of his term, Jaume Collboni will measure the options of closing, already in the first months of this new stage in the Barcelona City Council, agreements on issues that, in principle, should not pose many obstacles. The first of these could be an agreement to continue and speed up coverage of the Ronda de Dalt as far as possible, in the style of the Glòries agreement.
The mayor 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 support of the commons seems very difficult unless there are many concessions and both parties are able to find enough compensation to reach an agreement. One of them is the downward revision of the norm that obliges to reserve 30% of new promotions or rehabilitations for social housing. The other, which the mayor has been talking about repeatedly, is the modification of the ordinance on coexistence in public spaces.
From the PSC proposal, which the Deputy Mayor for Security, Albert Batlle, and the legal service of the City Council have begun to elaborate, it has come out, through the mouth of the mayor himself, that it will toughen the sanctions for some uncivil behaviors. However, the problem is not so much in the amount of the fines but in the fact that most of them do not end up being collected. Does it make sense, for example, not to touch the chapter dedicated to street vending when in recent years only 1.2% of the fines imposed on vendors have entered the municipal coffers? It is a stigma, that of wet paper, that has accompanied this regulation approved in the days of Mayor Joan Clos from minute one.
While once again a way is being sought to make these sanctions really effective, the municipal government is willing to promote another path of penance provided for by the ordinance itself but very little exploited, that of alternative measures to the economic fine that benefit the community by offering a broader catalog of benefits and easier access.
The Socialists want the new civility ordinance to establish the rights and duties of citizens more clearly than in the current text, that the regulation be an “expression of democratic authority” and that it be applied through prevention, education and communication and, above all, without that authority shaking its pulse when it comes to sanctioning.
They also want to include in the revised text aspects not contemplated at the time due to 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 cleanliness that in many cases are disseminated by other regulatory texts of the City Council. An example, the uncivil behavior of cyclists and skaters.
Among the ideas of the PSC to promote a civility that is questioned by the unsupportive behavior of many foreigners and natives are those of continuing to develop a continuous campaign on rights and obligations in which information is provided as much as necessary on the most infringed rules and the punishment that their violation entails. The Coexistence Office will report directly to the Prevention and Security area. And an almost impossible mission given the null response that the demands of previous mayors have had in the autonomous administration: that the Generalitat provide the tools, the economic resources and the personnel (mossos) to guarantee coexistence in public space. Likewise, the socialist government, which maintains intact its desire to create the figure of the “night mayor” and provide it with means, intends to rethink -in the line of reinforcing it- the role of civic agents.
Reaching agreements on the rules that must govern coexistence in an increasingly saturated, disputed and conflictive public space and the sanctions to be imposed on offenders has always been an extremely complex operation at Barcelona City Council. The approval of the civility ordinance (December 23, 2005) left cracks in the government alliance between the PSC and its minority partners of Iniciativa per Catalunya. BComú’s predecessors unsuccessfully opposed the inclusion of prostitution and begging in those regulations. Subsequently, an attempt to lower that text, orchestrated by the councilor Jaume Asens in the first term of Ada Colau, crashed against a wall raised by the lack of consensus. In the second term, the deep differences between commoners and socialists aborted any other attempt.
With these precedents, the possibility of an agreement on this sensitive matter between PSC and BComú is almost nil, especially when the group chaired by Ada Colau has already warned its former partners that it is not willing to swallow a tightening of sanctions, that its bet is rather the opposite.
Thus, the socialists look the other way and see the group that is still led by former mayor Xavier Trias. As is the case with the review of the obligation to allocate 30% of new developments and large renovations to affordable housing, the affinity between the two formations that occupied the first two positions in the May 28 elections are more than evident.
The sum of the 11 councilors of Junts to the 10 of the PSC would guarantee the approval of the modification of the ordinance (it does not seem complicated to add the 4 councilors of the PP to that majority either) but it would greatly complicate a government pact between Collboni and Colau (with or without the former mayor) in the Barcelona City Council. The commons, through the mediation of the former mayor of Urbanism, Janet Sanz, have warned their former partners this week that they are forgetting variable arithmetic, that Ada Colau’s party cannot conceive of any other way to govern the city than through an alliance of the left and that, to achieve excellence, that entente should include the Esquerra Republicana. Today that option seems completely unlikely, although tomorrow, once the verdict of the polls is known, things may begin to change.
