Her vocation for public service has led her to move through different positions within the public administration since she became a civil servant. For four years she has been responsible for one of the main management areas of the Council of Tenerife. Berta Pérez, second vice president of the Island Corporation, is the Minister of the Presidency, Finance and Modernizationand one of the pillars on which the president rests, Peter Martin, who has once again proposed that he accompany him on the list for 28M, to which Pérez has said yes. In these four years she has raised the Cabildo’s budget to the highest in its history in 2023 and she has managed to modernize an institution that, as she herself defines, “was in technological prehistory.”
-The Cabildo has the highest budget in its history this year, with 948 million…
“Indeed, but with the incorporation of the remaining funding affected, which was 36 million, the final budget is 984 million. Thus, with the last budget modification that we made, which was 125 million, half of it has been dedicated to new policies and the other to changing the financing of the loan that we had planned, and that now we may not even ask for”.
-What are the main lines of the budget?
“It has a marked social character. The items for social policies have increased, which receive more than 200 million, an also large increase in employment, agriculture, and the determined commitment of the Cabildo to the municipalities, both through the Municipal Cooperation Plan, and the Office of Comprehensive Assistance. Sustainable Development, modernization, roads and mobility are also aspects that have been reinforced”.
-Before you mentioned investment in new policies, does the agreement with the ULL to improve mobility fall into that section?
“We have agreed an agreement with the Faculty of Medicine and with this budget modification we are endowing it. The same will consist of financing a pilot project with two million so that the first, second and third courses delay the entrance to classes and see how this affects mobility ”.
-Is the Modernization area the one that has made the most progress?
“The Modernization area is inclusive of all the policies that I carry out in my area. Because with Modernization we have updated, modernized and automated all the processes of the Treasury, accounting, many in terms of human resources, with a negotiating spirit that has never been found in this Cabildo. We were the first Administration to carry out stabilization, even before the 20/21 law, and later we were the model and reference for the other councils and town halls”.
-What happens with the new calls?
“We have developed them in parallel. The unions signed with the previous corporation that the selection processes would not be carried out until the stabilization was carried out and the bad thing is that they left some 2019 processes called, and that was burning in my heart. We managed to convince the unions that we could not paralyze the execution of these 2019 processes until they were finished, because it would be unfair, and since inaction was not an option, we rushed to stabilization. For this reason, we are combining the processes and now we will begin to call the new calls”.
-Modernization, therefore, is not only removing the paper…
“TRUE. Although there are eight lines of action, the two main legs have been administrative simplification and electronic administration. I cannot do the same thing electronically that I was doing manually, I have to simplify procedures, and that is also modernization. We have removed 300 procedures out of 600 that existed, we have even urged other administrations to abolish unnecessary procedures with us”.
-Which are the processes in which more progress has been made?
“When we arrived, 372 files were being processed electronically, and we went up to 29,000 in 2022. Before one table to another, registration was made. Technologically we were in prehistory. With the arrival of the pandemic, a project that was scheduled to take four years accelerated in such a way that many of the lines were commissioned in two. Proof of this is that we have become the benchmark for electronic certificates, of which we have issued some 100,000 throughout our entire mandate”.
-Citizens and municipalities have been the target of this modernization…
“Our motto is the citizen at the center. We have converted registry offices into citizen assistance offices, which has earned us recognition at the national level. We have a plan to care for the elderly, we have reduced processing times by 20%, and a citizen does not wait more than 15 seconds when he has previously made an appointment. And if it is an emergency, it is processed on the fly”.
-The last great addition to this process is the office of Integral Attention to the municipalities…
“We intend to provide technical, administrative, legal and technological support to the 31 municipalities, but especially to those with less than 20,000 inhabitants. But, in addition, we want the town halls to become one more island office for the citizen, so that he can find out how his file is going without having to travel to the capital. The Cabildo is not in Santa Cruz, it is all over the island, which is why support for the municipalities is essential”.
