The Canary Islands have not fared well in the distribution of 600 million euros for the rehabilitation and modernization of public buildings or for public use. The Ministry of Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda, which is the department in charge of distributing these European funds, It has not granted the local entities of the Archipelago even 2% of the money. A percentage that by itself does not say much but is well below the weight that the Autonomous Community has in the country as a whole, both in number of inhabitants and in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). If the region is considered represents between 4 and 5% of Spain in almost any macro or socioeconomic indicatorit turns out that the distribution of the Ministry directed by Raquel Sanchez Jimenez doesn’t do it justice. It is true that the projects of the Canarian town halls and councils had to fight with those of the other local entities of the country under a competitive concurrence regime, but that does not mean that the funds finally assigned to the island institutions are, it must be insisted, much lower than those that would correspond to them in an equitable distribution.
The Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, the Mitma, published on Monday the final resolution of the second line of aid for the rehabilitation of publicly owned buildings. These subsidies are part of the Transformation, Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRTR) with which the Government of Pedro Sanchez wants to channel the extraordinary injection of European funds in the coming years. Public buildings or buildings for public use will thus be improved thanks to an investment of 1,080 million euros, of which 480 million are distributed among the Autonomous Communities and the remaining 600, among local entities. It is of this last amount, of those 600 million euros to be distributed among municipalities, councils and island councils, of which 290.2 million remained to be allocated after a second screening. Well then, It turns out that of the 180 projects that will be distributed those close to 300 million euros, only two are from Canarian institutions.
Local entities in the region scratch less than 12 million euros out of a total of 600
This is the proposal for the rehabilitation of the building shared by the Local Police and Civil Protection in the town of Fañabé, in the Tenerife municipality of Adejefor just over 1.8 million, and the rehabilitation of the Casona de la Gorvorana in Los Realejos, also in Tenerife, for about 1.9 million euros. So from this second line of aid some 3.7 million of a total of 290.2 will come to the Canary Islands, that is, a meager 1.27%. And that there were not a few projects presented by the institutions of the Archipelago. Up to 40 requests came to Mitma from the Islands, but only those two of the municipalities of Adeje and Los Realejos prospered. So they run out of European funds for their improvement and rehabilitation on Tourist Information Center from Corralejo, in Fuerteventura; the General Antequera building in Santa Cruz de Tenerife; the Miller building in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; or the Local Police building in the Miller Bajo urbanization, also in the capital of Gran Canaria. Likewise, the reform of the old psychiatric hospital, which was a proposal of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, was left out of the aid, within the same city. And the same has happened to the projects for the rehabilitation of the pavilion Fernando Luis Gonzalez, in Santa Ursula; the comprehensive reform of the headquarters of Fiestas de Santa Cruz de Tenerife, promoted by the capital city council; the improvement and restoration of the old convent of San Sebastián, in Los Silos; or the rehabilitation and works for energy efficiency and saving in the Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (TEA), one of the two projects presented by the Island Council that did not even receive a score, either because they did not meet the basic requirements of the call or by withdrawal of the institution itself.
front line
So far the second line of aid, the one resolved this Monday, but it is that the local entities of the Archipelago did not fare well in the first screening either. So there were six –six out of a total of 402, a meager 1.49%– the projects of Canarian institutions that deserved some money. The municipalities of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Hermigua -in La Gomera-, Adeje and Mogán scratched from this first line of subsidies an amount of about 7.25 million of euros, an amount to which were added the practically 800,000 euros that the Gran Canaria Cabildo obtained for the rehabilitation of the property of the Unesco World Heritage Center of the Biosphere. Thus, the global amount obtained by the local institutions of the region between both lines of aid does not even reach 12 million euros. Twelve million out of a total of 600, which is equivalent to 1.98%.
Of the 582 ‘award-winning’ projects between the two aid lines, only eight are from the Archipelago
If the distribution of these European funds for the rehabilitation of public buildings were based on the population or economic weight of each region on the national map, the entities of the Autonomous Community would have corresponded close to 30 million.
