The president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Pedro Martín, affirmed yesterday that the Next Generation funds of the European Union (EU) are a “revolution”, but, at the same time, said that the lack of personnel in the administrations and the excessive bureaucracy generate “Restlessness” and “nervousness”. For this reason, he appealed to “put the batteries and hit”, managing resources “quickly and efficiently”, recognizing that the current public framework “is not the most appropriate.”
In addition, he warned that the councils are “very unknown” in the peninsula due to their “difficult fit” in the funds as they are local corporations and depend on the Government of the Canary Islands.
This is how Pedro Martín expressed himself during the opening ceremony of the Local Administration in Resilience Conference, a meeting organized by the Tenerife Council and the Novagob Foundation, which was held at the Tenerife Auditorium. This event was inaugurated by the President of the Government of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres; the president of the Cabildo of Tenerife, Pedro Martín; the second vice president and island councilor for the Presidency, Finance and Modernization of the Cabildo, Berta Pérez, and the president of the Canarian Federation of Municipalities (Fecam), María Concepción Brito.
Ángel Víctor Torres pointed out that these funds total more than 7,000 million euros for the Canary Islands and that this “drunkenness of numbers” should bring with it greater flexibility in its application for the outermost regions. “Europe has to adapt to the different territories,” he said.
In this way, the regional president warned that the terms of execution of the funds “are limited” -the React-EU until 2023, the resilience mechanism until 2026 and the ordinary until 2030- and congratulated the Spanish Government for capturing the amount highest fund of the entire continent. The president also shared his wish that the funds “make us more competitive.” Meanwhile, María Concepción Brito valued the existing cooperation between all the Canarian administrations, betting on maintaining the co-governance model. “We cannot fail,” he emphasized. Meanwhile, Berta Pérez stressed the transformative power of the Next Generation funds in social and ecological matters. “It is a paradigm shift,” he said. With more than 400 registered, this conference, which took place in person and online, sought to analyze the consequences that the management of European Next Generation funds destined for recovery brings for local corporations.
