Pedro Sánchez visited this Sunday the construction works of the B-40 motorway tunnel, between the municipalities of Olesa de Montserrat and Viladecavalls, in a show of commitment to this project. If the road is not built, it will not be due to a lack of will on the part of the central administration. That was the message.
And the fact is that the future of the B-40 – one of ERC’s commitments to get PSC support for the budgets – is up in the air due to the lack of understanding between the central government and the Generalitat. Both admit that the negotiations are stuck, to the point that they have already entered a phase of reproaches.
The Government agreed to unblock the project, which ERC has historically opposed, with an agreement that set a deadline of March 31 to sign the agreement with the Ministry of Transport to build it. The deadline has passed, and now there are significant discrepancies between the two parties.
The Ministry of Transport and the Department of Land differ on virtually everything regarding the B-40. As for the road model – urban road or motorway –; with regard to financing – the Government does not want the 200 million required to go to the third additional provision -; regarding the coordination of the project – the Catalan Executive wants to exclude the central Government -, and even regarding the final goal of the route of the road.
The situation makes the ministry question the real will of the Catalan Government to unblock the work and they have the impression that it is already fine for them to remain stuck.
Thus, the Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez, and the Minister of Territories, Juli Fernández, publicly showed yesterday the distancing of their positions. Sánchez alluded to a “necessary infrastructure” on which “we continue to work” and only dropped the need for his team to participate in the “technical monitoring” of the project. “On the part of the ministry, no problem”, she went so far as to say, but after listening to the intervention of councilor Fernández, who underlined each and every one of the discrepancies that separate them, the minister changed her tone.
The councilor referred “to the terms” of the budget agreement, which alludes to the “Ronda Nord project between Terrassa, Sabadell and Castellar del Vallès”. In his opinion, this translates into “an interurban road” and “not a high-capacity road”, as the central government wants. In addition, the councilor warned that the third additional provision of the Statute “is not a real way to finance it”, as proposed by the ministry, and asked for “another way of financing”.
The third additional provision established that for five years, after the approval of the Statute, the State would invest in Catalonia the weight corresponding to its GDP and, in case it did not do so, it would provide the money for the Generalitat to do the works
After listening to the minister, the minister took the floor again to highlight the failure to comply with the deadline of the budget agreement and regretted that there is an attempt to exclude the ministry from the coordination of the project.
The Ministry of Transport remembers that the Government did not move until March 1, a month after the pact with the PSC, and that they do not want the road to be extended. “They want it to end here – in Sabadell – but the Vallès mobility plan does not deny its possible continuity and we are not prepared to mortgage the area’s mobility”, they say.
The reproaches to the Catalan Government for having “leaked” the negotiations deserve a separate chapter. “They are the ones – they allege to Transports – who have breached” two agreements, the one on budgets and the one on confidentiality of negotiations.
