The Government of the Generalitat has finally given in to the requests of the town councils and is finalizing a decree law that will allow public and private swimming pools to be filled and refilled as long as they are opened to the general public. The formula to be able to adopt this measure is to consider the swimming pools of sports clubs, neighborhood communities and hotels and campsites as “climate shelters” against heat waves. The opening of these facilities must also be compensated by savings in water consumption, for example in showers.
The decree law, which will be approved on Tuesday, at the Government meeting and which must go through the Parliament, which will ratify it in the Permanent Deputation convened for Friday, April 19, before which Minister David Mascort will appear, was advanced this Saturday by El Periódico de Catalunya and confirmed by sources from the Acció Climàtica department.
The opening of swimming pools will not be the only modification contemplated in this review of the drought emergency plan, which will also include new measures regarding water consumption in tourist accommodation.
The new regulations are the result of the negotiation that the Generalitat has held in recent weeks with the local world, represented by the two municipal entities, the Federation of Municipalities of Catalonia (FMC) and the Catalan Association of Municipalities (AMC), which They have championed the demands of the town councils. In fact, this revised regulation should have already been included in the law accompanying the budgets of the Generalitat, but this was prevented by the non-approval of the regional accounts for this year, which in turn triggered the call for early elections on the 12th. of May.
The Government has highlighted that the new decree is the result of dialogue and the desire for consensus with the municipalities to provide them with more tools to face the drought emergency. It will be the town councils themselves, by virtue of the application of the principles of local autonomy, that will decide which pools they consider to be climate refuges. Both public and private can enter this category. In the case of these, their owners will have to reach agreements with the respective municipalities to define their uses.
Pools that obtain this consideration as a climatic refuge may be filled with the quantities essential to guarantee the quality of the water from a health point of view and must be compensated for water savings in other ways. The regulations will make it clear that if a pool is not registered as a climate refuge, it cannot be filled or refilled in any case.
The decree law will also open the possibility of limiting water consumption by tourists in those municipalities that, for three consecutive months, exceed the established maximum spending levels. In this case, the town councils will have to force the municipality’s tourist accommodation to comply with the general restrictions, that is, a maximum of 115 liters per person per day in an exceptional situation; 100 liters in an emergency situation, 90 liters in emergency 2 and 80 liters per person per day upon arrival in emergency phase 3.
