The El Rosario City Council presented yesterday at the Casa de la Cultura, in La Esperanza, the municipality’s citizen participation portal, «Created through the most powerful digital tool on the market and customized for El Rosario by the Redlines company». The mayor of El Rosario, Escolástico Gil (IR-Verdes), was in charge of pulling the esperancera blanket, as suggested by the communication campaign previously devised to present the portal https://participa.ay Ayuntamientoelrosario.org/ with the motto 18,318 ideas to improve, one for each inhabitant. It is, said the local councilor, the most “complete and powerful” website of the Canary Archipelago among those of its characteristics.
Along with Gil, the Transparency Commissioner of the Canary Islands, Daniel Cerdán; the Councilor for Citizen Participation of the El Rosario City Council, Jennifer Torres, and César Calderón, analyst and CEO of Redlines. “A participation process begins with transparency”, highlighted Cerdán, who described the new participation portal as a “cutting-edge and innovative advance”. “The City Council of El Rosario has started a path of open government that democratizes the institution and I hope that it will be followed by the rest of the local authorities of the Canary Islands,” he said.
For her part, the councilor of Citizen participation, Jennifer Torres (IR-Verdes), recalled that “we were one of the first municipalities in the Canary Islands to fully approve the Citizen Participation Regulation”, a regulation that went forward unanimously in 2019. He also encouraged citizens to use this tool. After his intervention, the general director of Redlines, César Calderón, specified the characteristics of the new portal, on which they began to work since 2019 and which was affected, among other factors, by the restrictions derived from the pandemic.
A tool in your hands
“Now is the time to restore to the citizens the trust they have placed in this government. You, the residents of El Rosario, have, from now on, in your hands the tool to debate and participate. Ultimately, to be part of the municipal government, “said Escolástico Gil during his speech. “It is a modern platform adapted to a municipality like this,” he said during an event attended by many authorities. Apart from the first deputy mayor of El Rosario, Sara Cabello, the general director of Institutional Relations of the Vice Presidency of the Government of the Canary Islands, Carmen Nieves Gaspar; the general director of Transparency and Citizen Participation of the regional Executive, Marta Saavedra; the president of the Canarian Federation of Municipalities (Fecam) and mayor of Candelaria, María Concepción Brito, and Ezequiel Domínguez, vice president of the Commission for New Technologies, Electronic Administration, Transparency and Participation of Fecam and mayor of San Juan de la Rambla, along with the rest of the local government.
On https://participa.ay Ayuntamientoelrosario.org, which is already operational, the citizens of the municipality may become “part of its government, contributing their ideas, debating and voting on the initiatives of both the municipal government and its neighbors,” they expressed from the Consistory. And they added: «It is a powerful tool, which can be accessed from anywhere, from any device and which, with a simple registration and identity verification process, allows anyone registered in El Rosario and over 16 years spend to actively participate in decision-making ».
Reliable and safe environment
In more detail, through this platform, the citizens of El Rosario will be able to discuss the life of the municipality in a reliable and safe environment, propose ideas to the City Council, vote on them and even participate in the preparation of municipal budgets, becoming themselves in the municipal government. «In this way, the El Rosario government team fulfills its objective of articulating citizen participation, and it does so by resorting to the best international and national practices, building a solid, simple, reliable participatory ecosystem, accessible from various platforms and that, in addition, it places the municipality at the head of the best world practices in this matter “, includes the press release sent after the event.
You can open Discussions on any topic and give your opinion, without being linked to any subsequent action. Proposals can also be created with the aim of reaching the necessary support so that they can be voted on by the popular vote. In this process, comments can be made to improve it, until the necessary support is achieved. If they are successful, the proposal is raised to Votes and all users can support or reject it.
