PP: “Better late -and close to elections- than never”

Saturday 12th November 2022 · Mike Smith
Source: PP Xàbia Press Release

Rosa Cardona, lead representative of the Xàbia branch of the Partido Popular (PP) and assumed mayoral candidate for the local elections in May 2023, has issued a statement in response to the local government’s recent announcement with regards to the suspension of the collection of rubbish tax for next year as well as the extension of the 17% discount in property tax obligations.

“If, after three and a half years of the current legislature, there has been no time to govern, to manage and invest in Xàbia, the only alternative for the socialist government to emerge gracefully from this situation of inability to govern and manage is to throw one last dice with tax rebates. So welcome are the tax breaks!

“We are all grateful that in order to combat the galloping rise in prices that affects the pockets of families and the cash-flow of companies, measures are approved that offer a respite. The problem is that much more could have been done much sooner.

“We would have preferred that the socialist government had listened to us, when in the middle of the pandemic we proposed discount on the rubbish rate, when the hospitality industry was closed and the sector was begging for a reduction. In response, Chulvi’s words were “that a discount [to the rubbish tax] could not be done, that rubbish collection is a service that is provided and has to be paid for, whether or not there is anything to be collected”. They also told us, the opposition, that we were always with the same issue. Instead, we have gone from not being able to discount a rate for an affected sector to everyone being exempt from paying the whole rate in 2023, when coincidentally we are just a few months away from elections.

“This is how we have gone from nothing having been done in three years, not even having maintained and improved what was done by previous governments, to everything that is intended to be done in 2023. This is how we have come to feel a frustrating unease, especially when looking back and realizing everything that that could have been done so far has not been done. Especially since it turns out that, since the end of 2020, with the extraordinary suspension of the fiscal rules that limit spending in the tow halls, millions of euros that Xàbia had been collecting and that have remained unused were ‘unfrozen’.

“However, the worst political sin is that, despite being able to spend and invest [this surplus], it has come to everyone’s surprise that it has not been done, something as unforgivable as it is obvious. You just have to ask yourself what projects, works, improvements or investments have seen the light for more than two years so far. None, beyond many announcements and too many excuses.

“The penultimate to fall has been the reform project of the Primer Muntañar de Xàbia which, after its abrupt partial pedestrianization and improvement in the state of conservation, we officially found out in the middle of the last [council meeting] that the intervention project has been postponed until further notice. A fiasco to which must be added the eternal paralysis suffered by the auditorium project, the expansion of the Trenc d’Alba school, not having advanced a single millimetre in the modernization of the sanitation network or strategic projects that still do not appear, such as the future industrial estate, precisely because it is practically a project from the past, outdated and not updated, which cannot be sold as an attractive and competent industrial estate for the future.

With all this, it seems that those millions of euros ‘thawed’ and ready to invest have been turned into a ball by an exhausted Chulvi government, without ideas or projects, but yes, with many millions of euros in the banks from his pocket of the residents.

So, for everyone’s money to be in the bank, in that case, it is best that the money is in our pockets. For this reason, the fact that we are now being told that the good economic management of the government allows these tax exemptions, makes it clear that in reality there has been no economic management, but rather a storage of money. This is serious, since the purpose of an administration is to return what is collected in the form of services, infrastructure and in the maintenance of everything public, as well as to make the private sector prosper, which is also paying its taxes. The government should not govern just to savemoney, but to manage it diligently.

“Nor does the double standard of speed and urgency with which they are processed is clear proof of this, in that this kind of tax reduction began on November 3rd and on the 8th it was already announced to to the press, without even having passed through the council’s finance commission, while the other side of the coin is that in the face of the serious problem we have in citizen security, the file that regularizes the improvements in working conditions for the Local Police still it has not been sent to the negotiating table.

“The PP in Xàbia understands that it is good news that the local council stops absorbing part of the money from the residents which the local government does not know how to manage, nor transform into projects, infrastructures, or improvements. We also acknowledge that at this point in the legislature, this is what there is: only money in the bank and even so, we have no choice but to be grateful that we are given a tax reduction on historic vehicles, on licenses and authorizations, on the municipal nursery school and of course, the exemption from paying the rubbish tax, at least during 2023. The following year, if they feel like managing and returning their effort to the residents, we will have to work to reward them.

“The only problem is that these measures are late. Late, especially because not having taken a single project, infrastructure or improvement forward in three and a half years, the money that the residents will save in 2023, could also have been saved during the previous years. However, better late -and close to elections- than never.”

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