The City Council of Santa Cruz, through the Mobility area, has reached an agreement with the Government of the Canary Islands to make effective the suppression of taxi fare 1 (T1), so that, as is already happening in many municipalities of the Canary Islands, The capital has a single application rate throughout the municipal territory. Thus, in a meeting held with the regional Executive, attended by the mayor, José Manuel Bermúdez, and the Councilor for Mobility, Evelyn Alonso, the points were established that will allow the taxi sector in the capital to be on equal terms with the rest of the municipalities.
With this announcement, as the councilor explained, “we fulfill the word we gave to the sector last July, when at the Taxi Board we committed to working to eliminate rate 1.” Alonso thanked the sector for the patience they have had in these months in which “we have worked tirelessly to achieve this result, that only rate 3 is applicable.” This agreement, as the councilor advanced, will be ratified in an extraordinary plenary session next week.
The current situation of uncertainty in the sector has been prolonged over time after the judicialization by the Government of the Canary Islands, in the last mandate, of the unanimous decision of the Plenary to equate T1 to the High Tourist Zone, with the objective of benefiting the sector, since, until that moment, T1 practically coincided with the limits of the interurban rate (T3). Since this judicial process began, now, after several rulings against the decision adopted by the capital’s City Council, the latest ruling of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands has become final.
The current Government team, with the endorsement of municipal technicians, has been working on a proposal that meets all the requirements requested by the Price Commission of the Government of the Canary Islands to accept the equalization of both rates, encountering the rejection of the requests carried out.
Faced with this situation, the capital City Council, and after the Government of the Canary Islands systematically rejected the municipal allegations in defense of the plenary agreement taken in 2019, as well as the successive requests to equate rate 1 and 3, made the decision to request, directly to the Price Commission, the repeal of T1, a request that the Government of the Canary Islands agrees to authorize.
The Santa Cruz City Council defends that in practically the majority of municipalities on the Islands, rate 1 has been abolished, with rate 3 (interurban) only being applied in all municipal areas, and all of this regardless of the greater or lesser plot. urban area presented by said municipality, since the rate 1 has been eliminated in municipalities with a large urban area such as La Laguna, Puerto de La Cruz, Arona or Adeje.
Evelyn Alonso recalled that “the Price Commission, which is competent in this matter, rejected the request made in 2019, and in 2023 we made that request again with an independent technical report.”
