The mayor of Los Realejos, Adolfo González, announced yesterday that he is not giving up reopening the Camino de El Patronato towards the TF-5, closed on July 29 “unilaterally” by the Cabildo de Tenerife Highway area, without prior notice or communication to the City Council. “Our obligation is to defend the interests of the residents of this town, that is what we are doing and we are not going to stop,” he warned.
For this reason, and given the “administrative and political silence of the Cabildo, the government group has been forced to seek solutions. Thus, it has decided to request an action of territorial relevance, a legal figure included in article 19 of the Land Law of the Canary Islands that would involve the involvement not only of the Cabildo, but also of the regional Government “to favor the modification of planning in the area due to exceptional circumstances and articulate a three-party agreement in order to draw up the projects and execute as many actions as necessary, in order to guarantee the authorization of access to the fast track”, he explained.
This decision was adopted by the Local Government Board and will be transferred these days to both administrations. Meanwhile, until a definitive solution is found, the reopening of the road to the highway is required, because the current situation harms citizens. “In no case do we renounce the provisional and immediate recovery of access to the TF-5 as it existed for decades by El Patronato and we continue working to advance alternatives and not sit idly by,” González said during the press conference. which he offered accompanied by the first deputy mayor, Noelia González, to give an account of all the actions carried out so far by the City Council.
The mayor made a chronology of what happened from the end of July, when access to the TF-5 was prohibited, until today. He recalled that two days after the closure, the Consistory sent two proposals to open the road, one prepared by the Local Police and another by the Municipal Planning Department, which consisted of maintaining the access as it was or with a yield to the right of way in the TF-5, which would allow direct incorporation without the need to go up to the link roundabout, as was the case previously.
However, it took a month for the Consistory to receive a negative response to both options. The Cabildo’s argument was “the serious danger of that departure, having reports that encrypt a total of 69 accidents since 2016.” A fact that according to the first deputy mayor “is not real, since it does not refer to this specific point of the TF-5, but to a large section of the road”.
On September 30, the insular plenary approved a motion from the Popular Party (PP) group to study different alternatives that allow the exit to the TF-5 to be enabled with security criteria and access to be returned provisionally. It had the support of the Canarian Coalition (CC), the abstention of Podemos and the vote against the PSOE and Ciudadanos (Cs), “precisely those who hold the Presidency and the Ministry of Highways, respectively, and must comply with the agreement ”, underlined the mayor, who understood “that a plenary agreement should not be contradicted” despite the fact that they have dropped “that they will not comply with it”.
island ring
Taking advantage of the drafting of the closure of the Insular Ring in the only section that remains to be defined -Los Realejos-San Juan de la Rambla-, the municipal councilor asked that it be taken into account that the municipality needs an addition to the highway “not only in this point, but in many others, due to the high number of population and mobile fleet”. In addition, he required that it be done “independently of the General Management Plan (PGO), since it is in its final stretch and would entail the total paralysis of the document.”
Likewise, because it is a road that was integrated “naturally into the highway”, an area classified as rustic land, and nobody expected that it would be weighted. “If both this government group and the previous ones had had that prior information, some measure would have been adopted in the planning for its regularization,” González clarified.
Finally, the mayor pointed out that “in the entire TF-5 there are accesses to the road with circumstances and conditions much worse than that of the Camino El Patronato”, but out of institutional respect and in order not to harm other localities, he preferred not to list them.
