After almost 8 months of doubts, legal reports and political and citizen pressure, the local government of Los Silos, made up of CC and PP, has decided to accept the transfer of wastewater from Garachico to the regional submarine outfall, located in the Charco de la Araña. The Governing Board has already given its approval to the agreement with the Tenerife Island Water Council (Ciatf) that unlocks the first phase of the regional sanitation system for the wastewater of the Baja Island.
The mayor of Los Silos, Macarena Fuentes (DC), plans to report this Friday, December 17, the details of this decision, which It has already been described as “a betrayal of the people” by the Los Silos-Isla Baja Platform, the group that had previously threatened the mayor with denouncing her if she signed this agreement. The Los Silos agreement with the Ciatf was an essential requirement for the putting into use of a work already executed, which cost more than one million euros and will allow primary treatment and transfer of wastewater from the neighboring municipality of Garachico to the regional outlet. , located on the coast of Los Silos. In addition, it will serve to stop the untreated discharge of the sewage from the Silense municipality itself and repair the deteriorated outfall.
The refusal to sign the agreement put the development of the district system on the ropes, but it also put the Los Silos City Council in a serious predicament, since it was forced to make large investments to end some spills that could also lead to a complaint against the mayoress, in this case by the competent authorities. The decision not to sign the agreement left the solution to the serious problem of dumping wastewater into the sea solely in the hands of a city council that manages a budget of just 5 million euros and has suffered, for years, a difficult economic situation. Without agreement, the town was forced to face alone the creation of a treatment plant and the repair of the outfall.
The Minister of Sustainable Development and the Fight against Climate Change of the Tenerife Council, Javier Rodríguez (PSOE), had described as “nonsense and unreasonable” that the Silense City Council refused to sign the necessary agreement to put into operation the work of channeling the sewage from Garachico to the regional outlet. The Cabildo de Tenerife warned that it would need “at least 55 trucks a day” to be able to remove the sewage from Garachico and take it to Valle Guerra (La Laguna), which would cost “more than 13,000 euros every 24 hours.”
At the end of September, Rodríguez warned that “there is a project worth one million euros, which is already finished, tested and ready to be put into operation, but we cannot use it because the Los Silos municipal government does not sign the agreement. It is a three-way agreement that has the approval of the Ciatf and the Garachico City Council, but Los Silos does not sign, so the spillage and the contamination are maintained ”. With the approval of Silence, the Cabildo’s solution may begin to be applied in the short term.
Platform rejection
While the municipal decision is being held in the Cabildo, the Los Silos-Isla Baja Platform is radically against it and has already started a strong campaign through social networks to show its frontal opposition to an agreement that they say is “trying to impose the reception of sewage from the municipality of Garachico in exchange for crumbs: a feasibility study for a natural treatment plant in Tierra del Trigo and Erjos, and the financing of the drafting of the El Polvillo natural treatment plant ». This group insists that “they do not pay for any treatment plant, they only finance the writing of a project.” In his opinion, “This is really ridiculous and humiliating. And in exchange they sell our coast and sea to become the toilet of the Isla Baja ».
The group, which has led the mobilizations since 2017 against the intensive system of regional purification of the Baja Island, has asked the members of the Silense government group to “leave the communication group” of the platform, “since their line of work and priorities no longer coincide with those of our association and, consequently, it would be essential that they did not know the strategies that we will carry out to save our coastline ».
“If our mayoress felt pressured by superior forces such as the Cabildo, Ciatf or her own party, the solution was to call her people to an urgent meeting, in the presence of the media, to tell what was happening. From that moment on they could have fought hand to hand. The easy thing was to sell and condemn this municipality to an unequal agreement, without precise dates or defined budgets to get the natural treatment plants, which would save us from the looming disaster. He has yielded without a fight to the end. This town has been betrayed. The smart thing to do would have been to resign and be on the side of the citizenry, ”the platform says.
