The common people see with some resentment the first steps of the new mayor of Barcelona, ??the socialist Jaume Collboni, who yesterday took his first month in office. The former deputy mayor of Urbanism Janet Sanz yesterday demanded from the council to stop behaving like a simple “manager”, to start “playing politics” and to “clarify what its city model is”, condition prior to defining possible government agreements at the City Council.
In the absence of former mayor Ada Colau, who has assumed a discreet profile during the beginning of this mandate, Janet Sanz was in charge of marking the first month of mayor Collboni. In the balance, some positive actions are combined, in the opinion of the common people, with others that they consider very worrying. Among the first, the decision to maintain the redevelopment project of the Ronda de Sant Antoni, approved at the time by BComú against the criteria of its PSC members, and the reform of the Rambla, although in this case what Collboni has done is to express his intention to speed up the works and cut their duration in half. And among the aspects that most upset the commons, the announcements that in October the mayor will launch the revision of the civics ordinance in order to toughen some sanctions, and the obligation to allocate 30% of new promotions or major renovations to social housing.
One cold and one hot for the socialists, according to the evaluation that the commons have made of their first initiatives of the government alone. On the positive side, the flexibility of radars that limit speed to 30 km/hour in school environments. Janet Sanz pointed out on this issue that in the last weeks of the Colau era, her department already commissioned a report to see the options for revising the regulations, which did not discriminate between school hours and the rest of the day and holidays. On the negative side, the possibility of extending the licenses of the nightclubs on the waterfront.
Janet Sanz didn’t miss the opportunity to poke fun at Jaume Collboni’s recent trip to Paris, where he attended the events of the French national holiday invited by the socialist mayoress Anne Hidalgo. The deputy spokeswoman of the municipal group of BComú “celebrated” that the mayor of Barcelona has precisely been in a city that has applied measures similar to those of the 30% reserve to alleviate the problem of the lack of affordable housing “Paris – pointed out Sanz, recalling the excellent relationship between Colau and Hidalgo – is the city with which we have most shared a model, with which we have worked side by side”. According to the councilor of the commons, Collboni should take note of the mobility policies developed in recent years by the Paris City Council, such as the extension of the bike lane network and other measures linked to the reduction of private traffic to combat pollution and climate change.
While waiting for Collboni to define a city model close to that of the communes, Janet Sanz once again chanted the mantra preferred by her formation: the agreement of the progressive forces (PSC, BComú and ERC) to set up a large government majority and avoid the temptation of the socialists to practice the variable arithmetic of the arm of the Trias per Barcelona group.
