The time of the mayors | BE Las Palmas

COVID 19 has placed them at the forefront of this ‘war’. Five mayors and mayors, of different political colors and from large and small municipalities of the Canary Islands, have spoken on the SER antenna and have agreed that, in the face of this health crisis, the municipalities have definitively ceased to be “younger brothers” , administratively speaking.

Each one of them spoke in their own way that the time for city councils has come: “We have been the containment wall of the pandemic” and “we are the first trench,” said Onalia Bueno and Patricia Hernández, mayors of Mogán and Santa Cruz de Tenerife . From Arrecife, Astrid Pérez argued that “not starting the house with the roof means counting on the municipalities in the first place.” Emilio Navarro, mayor of Santiago del Teide, said that “we are already preparing to face the impact when we leave the state of alarm”, while the mayor of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Augusto Hidalgo, asked that “it is time for us to stop to pay the duck of the state deficit ”.

The mayors and mayors demand greater coordination between institutions and above all more bureaucratic speed to deal with health emergencies, which have multiplied in their municipalities. And whose management has been “hell for local administrations”, as they have confessed. The impact of the coronavirus has been “almost catastrophic” both for the aforementioned capitals and for the two tourist municipalities.

Facing more expenses with less income has been its particular squaring of the circle, especially when three months have passed and the Canarian city councils have not yet received a single specific item from the autonomous government or the State. And the fact is that, although their time has come, the town councils need the indispensable collaboration of the rest of the administrations and the entrepreneurs themselves, to whom they sent the following message: “The box has to continue to be filled.”

Both the opening of schools in conditions and containing the vulnerability in which the majority of the residents of these cities have fallen, have been and will be borne by the councilors. Mayors and mayors to whom COVID has changed their relationship with their citizens, for the simple reason that they have lived this war against the virus at the foot of the trenches.

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