Five municipalities ask to reactivate the elevation of water from the Ebro to Andorra after 10 years stopped
A decade after they were invested 26 million public euros in the Elevation of Waters from the Ebro to Andorra, nothing is known about the continuity of this project and it is not claimed from Aragon either. Its first phase was concluded in 2012 with an expense by mining funds and the second and last part of the plan still remains, budgeted then at 22 million euros with an execution period of 18 months, a program that has been paralyzed due to lack of state funding.
The raising of the water from the Ebro River in Escatrón through a pipe to the Val de Arcos, in the Villa Minera, was conceived as an essential project that would ensure the supply of drinking, agri-food and industrial water for the mining towns, at a time when the fact that it was already known that the Andorran thermal power plant had an expiration date and that it was going to release 18 hectometers, more than triple that foreseen by the project.
However, ten years later the work is forgotten in a drawer of the state administration, that does not execute it, but also in the five municipalities that would benefit from it: Andorra, Albalate del Arzobispo, Ariño, Alloza and Alcorisa. In fact, the Commonwealth, which, according to what is not active and in the current legislature, has not constituted a new board despite the fact that the last president, the former mayor of Albalate under Archbishop Antonio del Río, called and sent several communications to the consistories insisting on the need to renew loads.
The Commonwealth has not sent minutes of its activity to the DGA as it should since October 2010. This inactivity has meant that the General Directorate of Local Administration of Aragon has already sent two letters to the municipalities Urging the dissolution of the Commonwealth through a full agreement. In the last letter, the DGA warned that if after two months it does not receive a response will proceed ex officio to the dissolution.
The five city councils agree that the work must be recovered after the million-dollar investment made, but the truth is that none of them has proposed in these years to reactivate the Commonwealth and bring the Elevation of the Ebro back to the political debate.
The last time the project was publicly put on the table at the highest level was in the last Aragón-State bilateral commission, in November 2019. The then Minister of Territorial Policy and Public Function, Meritxell Batet, promised to “carry out the work without dilation” through the public company Acuaes, although he did not commit deadlines.
Almost three years later and with a pandemic in the middle, no progress has been made on the project and there is no date for a new bilateral commission. Sources from the Government of Aragon assure that “no news” about it and that they do not know if it will take to the next bilateral because there is no scheduled date of celebration.
The City Council of Alcorisa is for the moment the only one that voted in favor of the dissolution of the Commonwealth a year ago and now, with the second letter from the DGA, the other four consistories are going to take the proposal to the plenary session. At the moment it is the only step, since there is no meeting in sight either.
Andorra, the town most in need of water, opposed this dissolution at the end of September because the government team, PSOE-PAR, had minimally in plenary and lost the vote. Its first acting mayor, Joaquín Bielsa, acknowledges that with the closure of the Térmica, 18 hectometres remain free – they are not released yet – and the City Council has the commitment of the Hydrographic Confederation of the Ebro (CHE) to be able to use them.
“For this reason -Bielsa underlines-, it may seem that finishing the elevation is less necessary, but there is an investment executed and it must be finalized“The elevation is necessary to feed business projects that will come and also for new agri-food initiatives or for mouth water,” says Bielsa, who stresses that the government team was in favor of dissolving the Commonwealth at the request of the DGA , because the entity has been inactive and considers that new tools must be sought to promote the project.