SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, May 2. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Canary Islands Coalition candidates to preside over the Cabildo de Tenerife and the La Laguna City Council, Rosa Dávila and Jonathan Domínguez, have demanded that the Council of Ministers make the La Laguna barracks available to the public, as agreed in 2019 .
Rosa Dávila and Jonathan Domínguez, who were accompanied by José Miguel Ruano and Miguel García -members of their respective candidacies-, explained at a press conference that in January 2019 the Cabildo and the Ministry of Defense signed an agreement to give a public use to the La Laguna barracks, and in it the destination of the spaces occupied by the San Francisco (El Cristo) barracks, the Las Canteras barracks and the Ingenieros de La Cuesta, Ofra-Vistabella and La Cuesta barracks were established. .
Rosa Dávila pointed out that the Council of Ministers, at the meeting on May 9, is going to announce the land that it is going to sell to the Sociedad Pública Empresarial de Suelo (Sepes) to allocate it to public housing and therefore demands that the barracks be included of La Cuesta, which is what was agreed in 2019.
The nationalist candidate criticized the “inaction” of the PSOE during these four years: “We would have to ask ourselves why the Cabildo de Tenerife and the City Council of La Laguna have abandoned the possibility of providing La Cuesta with homes, green spaces and better endowments, such and how we planned and left it foreseen in the previous mandate and why they have not promoted the agreement”.
Dávila stressed that it is the concept of a city for the people that has marked the CC’s action when it has governed, for which reason the party demands that the agreement with the Ministry of Defense be complied with “and not continue to sell smoke.” In addition, he asked that the money obtained from the sale of the barracks “be reinvested in the military infrastructure that exists in Tenerife, in such a way that they also benefit from this agreement that is important for the entire island.”
For his part, Jonathan Domínguez assured that the agreement signed four years ago was going to allow La Laguna to take a leap in quality, recovering for the lagoons and lagoons a large space of more than 250,000 square meters of military land for use social, educational, cultural, residential, commercial and leisure, “but the PSOE paralyzed it”.
With this agreement as a precedent, during the current mandate, Coalición Canaria presented several motions in which the Cabildo was urged to recover the aforementioned spaces. “That is why the statements of the mayor of La Laguna that the City Council and the Cabildo have the firm intention of acquiring the plot of the Cuartel del Cristo, because Pedro Sánchez announced that Defense land would be used for affordable housing, seem to us a certain cynicism. and among them was the aforementioned barracks,” the candidate explained.
“In La Laguna there are more than 2,500 applicants for public housing, and it is ridiculous that for the third municipality of the Canary Islands, the State Housing Plan 2022-2025, the PSOE would only have obtained land for 169 homes and, furthermore, they sell it as a success,” Dominguez said.
On the other hand, Rosa Dávila assured that if she becomes president of the Cabildo they will have “a leading role in promoting public housing on the Island”: “It is impossible to propose housing solutions without taking into account the metropolitan area, precisely because it is where the demand for real estate and housing solutions is most concentrated”.
For the CC candidate, “it is one of the great challenges that she wants to face and must be based on a public-private collaboration agreement and also on the management of municipal heritage land, for which we will create an Office to support municipalities. In these four years the PSOE has not done anything from the Cabildo in terms of housing nor has it been interested in the Canary Islands Housing Institute or VISOCAN, to assume the execution of the Housing Plan as established by the Law of 2003”.
Finally, Dávila recalled other specific proposals in this area, among which are the Plan for the Comprehensive Acquisition and Rehabilitation of Housing, first-opportunity housing for young people and a plan to acquire empty housing.
Jonathan Domínguez also denounced the “inaction” of the PSOE, “in the face of the agreements that were closed with the Cabildo and Defense in 2019, but also for its total abandonment with respect to carrying out the General Planning Plan, which has resulted in the stop the acquisition of possible land to build subsidized housing, which is essential for La Laguna to grow and advance”.
“How can we believe the electoral speeches of the Sánchez government talking about the fact that it is going to immediately build thousands of homes? Are we going to wait another four years?” he asked. “That is why today we reaffirm our commitment to recover these spaces of Defense for the citizens of the municipality, as signed in 2019, and to improve the quality of life of our neighbors thanks to new endowments and new spaces and services that place La Laguna in its rightful place,” he added.
