Bilbao heads the last stretch of the legislature with the pending issue of the entry of high speed
The mayor of Bilbao, Juan María Aburto, has demanded this Tuesday that the underground entrance of the high speed in the Biscayan capital be “expedited”. It is a project that, after innumerable delays, has yet to start, although there is already an agreement between the Basque Government and the central government to carry it out. “Bilbao needs more connectivity by land, sea and air to be able to grow in expectations and meet the demands of a city of small size but a reference in the southern part of Europe”, said the mayor in the last plenary session of the state of the town before of the spring municipal elections, which means that the last stretch of the legislature begins without having finalized one of the projects in which the mayor has been most involved and which has also cost him clashes with the Provincial Council of Bizkaia, which has not yet specified whether it will finance part of this work that Aburto considers strategic for Bilbao and also for Bizkaia.
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In his speech before the plenary session, the mayor has also demanded a response to the start of the works to bury the FEVE tracks in Zorroza and the advancement of line 4 of the Bilbao Metro, which will reach Rekalde. All of this as contributions to some transformations in the city so that the so-called ‘Guggenheim Effect’ “becomes more and more the ‘Bilbao Effect’, just as we constitute it at an international level”, he pointed out. Faced with the “apocalyptic panorama” painted by the opposition, Aburto considered that “Bilbao has a wonderful present but it has a great future ahead of us, which we are building daily”. “We want to go from the local to the global”, he stated. And in this sense, he has assured: “Every day there are more cities, companies and people who approach us to meet, collaborate, invest, develop their projects in Bilbao”. He recalled the figures for the entry of travelers through the Bilbao airport or the summer that we have experienced with a large influx of tourists, and, for this reason, he wanted to convey “confidence in the face of the uncertainty” that hangs over this autumn: “It it is in a situation of greater difficulty but not in the face of an apocalyptic scenario”, he said, and recalled that Bilbao “has come out of several economic crises”: “We are sure that we are going to manage to face any adverse situation again”.
In a self-satisfied speech with the management of his government team so far, he has highlighted that in very adverse situations for management, as has been the entire period of the pandemic, up to 81% of the mandate plan program has been completed, and that other plans have been developed that were not included as a consequence of the need to respond to specific questions of the crisis. In any case, he has assured that in these remaining eight months of the legislature they hope to complete 100% of the plan because, as he recalled, “it is not that we only have eight months left, but that we still have eight months of continuous work left”. “The electoral future does not make us lower our guard,” he reiterated.
Aburto, who has not yet revealed whether he will repeat for reelection, has described this legislature as one of “memory” and “agreement.” The memory, especially for the COVID-19 crisis and the people who have suffered or disappeared. And the agreement because, as he pointed out, the Bilbao City Council has been an example of a council in which “all the groups have joined forces in favor of the citizenry”, in the face of what he has described as “political noise in other parts of the Condition”. In this sense, he has thanked all the opposition parties -despite the fact that they have later been very critical of his management- and above all he has valued the PNV-PSE coalition that has achieved “a strong and seamless government ”, he has said, and has called for everyone to continue “collaborating” “without sterile fights”.
As for future projects, the mayor has valued the actions in the different neighborhoods of Bilbao. “As difficult as some requests are, they remain our priority,” he said. “The neighborhoods are the veins that pump blood to the heart of the city,” he has said. In addition to the big projects such as advancing in the “Special Plans for Peñascal, Punta Zorrotza or Abando”, anticipating the underground arrival of the AVE to Bilbao, Aburto has highlighted the sporting events that are planned for the coming years in the Biscayan capital and that They continue to place it in the international spotlight: the first of them leaving the Tour in 2023, and then the Women’s Champions League soccer finals in 2024 and the men’s Europa League in 2025.
Municipal Police protests
The mayor has spent little time talking about security in Bilbao, beyond reiterating his commitment to increasing the presence of the Municipal Police on the streets of Bilbao – from Thursday to Sunday, especially – and holding an annual OPE in addition to Security workshops in all Bilbao districts.
Precisely at the end of his first intervention, representatives of several Bilbao Municipal Police unions interrupted the plenary session with posters calling for the resignation of the Councilor for Citizen Security and first deputy mayor of the Bilbao City Council, Amaia Arregi. It has been the councilor herself who has informed them that they could not intervene in the plenary session and has asked them to leave and the congregants have left at a time when the session was in a 15-minute recess after the mayor’s speech . The union representatives of the Guardia Urbana have gathered this Tuesday at the San Agustín Municipal Center and before the Bilbao City Council, coinciding with the plenary session, because they are against the new calendars that are being imposed on them to reinforce the presence of officers on the streets on weekends. This has been one of the common issues in all the interventions of the opposition groups, who have demanded from the mayor that they dialogue with the unions to reach an agreement.
The opposition asks for more aid
From the PP, Raquel González has demanded more aid for the people of Bilbao and at the same time a reduction in taxes “in a solidary and sufficient way”, and has assured that it is an issue that can be done because the next budgets will be made with a collection record. He has also criticized that the City Council will embark on projects such as the Bizkaia Tower and the entrepreneurship center, which will be inaugurated next Monday, in which the City Council will invest 7.5 million over 15 years and which the popular representative has called ‘Torre batzoki’, a denomination has bothered the mayor a lot. She has asked Aburto for support from the Municipal Police and has painted a Bilbao with robberies and insecurity in all the neighbourhoods. In her intervention, González has asked that projects such as the expansion of the Bilbao Fine Arts be left for “periods of fat cows”. She has also demanded more commitment to the victims of ETA, for example putting up a plaque in memory of Miguel Ángel Blanco.
Ana Viñals, from Elkarrekin Podemos-IU-Equo has criticized that the mayor speaks of recovery because it is “out of reality” and has considered that the figures of unemployed in the Biscayan capital, more than 21,000, are “very worrying”. She has also criticized that tourism is “very dependent on the outside”, for which she has considered that it should go from major international events to a model of “state and sustainable tourism”. Viñals has also been concerned that the Housing area is the one with the least budgets and has asked for an increase in social emergency aid. In terms of security, he stated that the pact reached is not adequately solving all the challenges, so it must be “evaluated in depth” and has asked the Government to negotiate “as soon as possible” with the police unions “a stable agreement” that secure the necessary means in Bilbao. Viñals added that the mayor is not leaving “a clear political legacy in Bilbao” and Bilbao is “losing leadership and identity as a city”.
For her part, the mayor of EH Bidu Jone Goirizelaia has spoken of “chronic” unemployment in Bilbao of 20,000 unemployed. Along with this, she has cited other “chronic” problems such as the fact that average rents do not exceed 12,000 euros a year in neighborhoods such as Otxarkoaga or Uretamendi or the pool of 8,000 applicants for affordable housing. Goirizelaia has highlighted that to all this is added the increase in mortgages and inflation. “With a panorama as catastrophic as they now predict, the dynamic Bilbao full of visitors that we have seen in recent months was a beautiful mirage,” she said. For this reason, she has assured that there will be a lack of more public measures against the cost of living and believes that the City Council can articulate policies, promote the energy transition, improve the working conditions of civil servants or intervene on the right to housing.
For their part, the PSE-EE and PNV groups have valued the coalition pact and have insisted on the mayor’s message that “no one will be left behind”. The socialist spokeswoman, Yolanda Díez, has pointed out that we are facing a “very difficult situation” and from the Bilbao City Council they opted to “provide concrete solutions, supporting more global measures”. Diez has highlighted that the socialists are in all the governments of Bilbao, from the municipal, to the Diputación, the Basque and the central, and has cited different agreements of the Sánchez Government as an example of the measures they take. She has also pointed out that the socialists have a culture of pact and have proven to be a responsible partner.
Nekane Alonso, from the PNV, has highlighted that they will continue to “give everything” to guarantee well-being and quality of life, with “no one being left behind” and offering “credibility and stability”. “And we will do it with the vocation and desire for dialogue and consensus that characterizes us,” she added. As she has pointed out, they claim “politics with capital letters”, “of agreement, healthy and true politics”.