The plenary session of the Granadilla de Abona City Council yesterday unanimously agreed to reject the airport declaration Tenerife South as a sensitive area, a measure that promotes Tenerife Council to end the queues to take a taxi at the facility in the south of the Island. The vote of all the parties with representation in the Granada City Council – including CC and PP, which in the Cabildo do support this measure – It implies the refusal of taxis from other municipalities to pick up passengers at the southern airport except in very exceptional cases.
This decision of the Granada City Council, supported by the parties that govern in pact (PSOE and PP) and those of the opposition (CC and Vox), comes after the announcement by the Cabildo of Tenerife that it had reached an agreement with this Consistory for the declaration of Reina Sofía as a sensitive area during a meeting held on November 22 , in which representatives of the taxi sector were also present.
This meeting, which was not attended by the mayor of Granadilla, Jennifer Miranda (PSOE), but by her Councilor for Transportation, Carmen Rodríguez (PSOE), was held in order to end the long waits for a taxi at the second largest airport. important of Canary Islands and the seventh in Spain, which received 10.8 million passengers and 75,600 operations in 2022.
After the aforementioned meeting, the Cabildo Government announced in a statement that it had agreed with the town councils of Granadilla and San Miguel to declare Tenerife South as a sensitive area. The airport infrastructure is located in their territories and, therefore, they have taxi responsibilities, mainly Granadilla. This cataloging allows taxis from other municipalities to pick up passengers when there are peaks in demand and the vehicles from these two municipalities are not enough to provide the service.
The Granada City Council has opposed, however, this solution. And it has done so, furthermore, in the most forceful way possible: through an institutional motion supported unanimously by the entire plenary session. The aforementioned motion, presented by the members of the Granada Government (PSOE and PP), includes an action protocol in cases in which the queue of passengers waiting for a taxi at the airport exceeds 20 minutes.
In these cases, according to the protocol approved in plenary session, the measure will be activated by which the Granadilla de Abona and San Miguel units that are not on guard within their municipalities will enter the premises. “Only if these units were insufficient, would taxi drivers from other municipalities be allowed to pick up fares, as long as they have accessed the airport to drop off clients, an issue that will be controlled by the stop manager who carries out his duties at the airport,” specifies the City Council in a statement.
The mayor of Granadilla, Jennifer Miranda, insisted in plenary session on the arguments for which she rejected the declaration of Tenerife South as a sensitive area a month ago: «The taxi sector in Granadilla is not to blame for what happens at the airport. . “It is the daily queues suffered by all citizens of the South that are responsible for the fact that journeys that usually last between 30 and 40 minutes end up lasting more than an hour and a half.”
The socialist councilor also pointed out, according to a statement from the Granada City Council, that the statements of Rosa Davila (CC), in which she stated that the airport is “hijacked”, are “inappropriate for a president of the Cabildo.” Miranda reiterated that “Granadilla will not support the declaration of the airport as a sensitive area,” for which he thanked the rest of the political parties for their support.
In addition to supporting the protocol, the Granadilla plenary session agreed to ask the Cabildo and the Government of the Canary Islands urgent measures to alleviate the traffic problem in the south of Tenerife, “where not only taxi drivers, but thousands of workers in the tourism and service sector, are trapped daily.”
