Whether or not the Santa Cruz City Council has a budget for participatory budgets will no longer depend on political will. The new regulation of Citizen Participation, which will be definitively approved next January, has established that these must be 0.5% of the total budget of the City Council. This means that if the general accounts go up, so will the money for the projects with the most votes among those proposed by the neighbors. This was explained yesterday by the area councilor, Javier Rivero, who pointed out that the departure for this matter will be one and a half million next year, to be executed between 2022 and 2023. “The execution will be biannual because that gives us more time to spend larger amounts such as this case, which goes from 1.1 million to 1.5 ″. Rivero acknowledges that this 0.5% shielding is due to an amendment by UP to the Citizen Participation Regulations.
What is not yet clear is the maximum cap per project. “Right now it is at 80,000 but we are considering it to be 40,000 because that would allow us to go faster when executing the works that are voted the most,” explained Rivero. The also mayor of Accessibility, detailed that in any case, work will be done so that projects that go beyond that budget limit, if the technicians consider that they are viable, can be executed by other areas of the City Council.
Regarding the Participation Regulation, Rivero, advanced that at the moment they are already working so that it can be accessed through easy reading, that is, translating the technical and administrative language into one that is understandable by the entire population. “We have anticipated the norm approved by Congress so that all public administration documents can be read through easy reading, and we will be one of the first in Spain to do so. For them we have allocated 5,000 euros and 10,000 more to a campaign to disseminate the new regulation, which has among its main novelties the possibility of convening popular consultations ”.
