is still in sight unfinished structure concrete new Casal dels Retirees from the district of bitem. A grant of 52,672 euros from the Tarragona Provincial Council It served to raise the last of a single floor on the site of one of the narrow streets of this local entity of less than just 1,150 souls, attached to the Catalan municipality of Tortosa. Without walls or pavement, still with a gravel floor, and with a square hole in the ceiling that suggests what should become the entrance of light from an interior patio, the building, of no more than 250 square meters, has two years waiting for funds to undertake the “second phase”, which is still a euphemistic way of saying that he is waiting for the money to be able to finish the work and finally serve as a meeting place for the elders of Bítem.
If nothing strange happens, that should happen next June 30, when the Government will transfer to Tortosa City Council the 250,000 euros contemplated in the General State Budgets (PGE) by 2023 as a nominative and finalist grant. A game that appears in the accounts not because someone in the Ministry of Finance had the sensitivity to think on their own initiative of the 150 members of the Casal dels Jubilats de Bítem. “This has been for Ferran Bell (former mayor of Tortosa and today PDeCAT spokesperson in Congress). The project is done, but the money is over and now the remainder of the work has to be tendered with the funds that will come from the State,” explains Juan José, a municipal official attached to this district, of which he is a neighbor.
Miguel Angel Gavilanes
The PGE received the necessary support in November 2022 thanks to an arduous negotiation with many gangs from the socialist minister’s team Maria Jesus Montero. This is not usual when the Government has an absolute majority. Parliament approves the bills that come to it with few changes, if anything amendments promoted by the parties with executive power are introduced. But since 2015, when Mariano Rajoy lost the absolute majority, moving forward with the PGE is a bobbin lace, a legitimate souk that puts parliamentary transversality to the test and in which the smallest parties or parties with specific territorial implantation, if they are clever, can strain claims that otherwise perhaps they would not find a place.
Tortosa is one of the Spanish municipalities that appears the most times in the corrections approved at the last minute by the Congress of Deputies.
The Catalan city has specialized in putting the body in the sprint to get in the photo finish. Up to 5.6 million euros has been received via amendments in this legislature, despite having no more than 34,000 inhabitants. For the current PGE, the PDeCat, with its four parliamentarians, took advantage of the occasion and managed to incorporate amendments worth some 80 million euros linked to projects in Catalonia. Many of them have as beneficiaries initiatives in this population of Tarragona, almost on the border with the Valencian Community. And Ferran Bel, responsible for the negotiation with the Government, is to blame.
“I have been mayor of Tortosa for eleven years (2007-2018). I know the needs of the city council, and in coordination with the current mayoress (Meritxell Roigéfrom the PDeCat franchise coalition, Together for Tortosa), it is not difficult for me to detect them because I have identified them,” explains Bel in conversation with El Confidencial.
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carlos sanchez
The parliamentarian details that, since his party does not govern the Generalitat de Catalunya, now chaired by Pere Aragonès (ERC), its formation considered that the best strategy was to negotiate specific projects and not focus the battle for large items on infrastructure, a role that they assumed would be assumed by the Republicans, who were more decisive in granting majorities. “From my experience in Madrid, I have also seen that the most useful thing is to make amendments to make transfers to entities or town halls. When they are incorporated into the Budgets, then you sign the agreement with the corresponding Ministry, which is the one that transfers the resources and gives two years to execute them. We flee from negotiating infrastructures that depend on the State and whose execution is difficult to control. If we get 90 million euros, they will surely arrive in Catalonia before June 30,” he asserted.
The list of amendments linked to Tortosa goes exactly along that line. The two largest projects incorporated into the PGE have the City Council as executing Administration. The plan to expand the Felip Pedrell Auditorium Theater will have 2.5 million euros. The reform to convert the old school Els Josepets in a multipurpose sports hall in the heart of the old town, it has allocated 1.5 million euros. The two initiatives are old municipal projects that did not have sufficient resources to unblock them.
In the first case, the opposition (ERC, the CUP and Ciudadanos) came to block financing in 2019, taking advantage of the fact that the mayoress is in a minority by one vote. Then the pandemic came and everything went on hiatus. With the money of the State secured via PGE, Meritxell Roigé presented this same Friday the projector updating and expanding the Auditorium, with a global budget of 3.6 million. One more pike in his electoral program for the municipal elections next May. Roigé has claimed these initiatives for months. He even incorporated them as future achievements in his end of year speech as mayoress, disseminated through the municipal social accounts. His challenge now is to demonstrate management capacity and carry them out.
“The Els Josepets project seeks to revitalize and regenerate the neighborhood of the historic center. It has to serve as a lung for an area that was losing population,” explain sources from the local government team. “The expansion of the Auditorium is necessary because there is a lot of demand for social and cultural activities, but it is also designed to host economic forums.”
There have been more amendments: 560,000 euros for the Doctor Ferran Foundation, dedicated to biomedical research; 330,000 euros for the Tortosa campus of the Rovira i Virgili University (where Bel teaches economics as an associate professor); 300,000 euros for the UNED University Consortium in the town of Tarragona; or 160,000 euros for the Terres Travel Festival, an international event specialized in audiovisual production linked to tourism.
“To negotiate it is very good to have been mayor because it is the best school that not everything is black and white”
Is Ferran Bel taking advantage of his status as a deputy in Congress and the government minority to scratch money for your city? The Catalan parliamentarian does not deny it, although he points out that Tortosa is just one of several towns that will benefit from his party’s amendments. He cites the case of the million euros budgeted for the Móra la Nova Railway Museumanother municipality of Tarragona.
The deputy, who has been in Congress since 2016, vindicates the old negotiating school of the now-defunct Convergència, when, before the process impregnated all Catalan politics and contaminated the relationship with the State, the nationalist formation took advantage of the windows of minority governments to facilitate the approval of accounts in exchange for investments and economic transfers to Catalonia. He did it with the PP and with the PSOE. “You never get everything you want and to negotiate it is very good to have been mayor because it is the best school that not everything is black and white,” he says.
open phones
In his opinion, the key to reach the last round of the PGE strong is have kept the phones open with the Government in other matters. “The Budgets could have been drawn up without the votes of the PDeCAT. We were not essential. But We are committed to supporting the labor reformfor example”, says Bel. For the PGE, the dialogue is directly with the minister Maria Jesus Montero and his team, non-stop in the socialist group.
The recipe as achiever budget: “It is to have an open road with the Government and that the government has an open road with you in many things. In political negotiation there is one thing that I have learned, and that is that you have to be very serious and honest and never cheat. If it’s a yes, it’s a yes, and if it’s a no, it’s a no. is the tradition of the old CiU. We have always been recognized that we are very clear in negotiations”. In Tortosa they already know it.
is still in sight unfinished structure concrete new Casal dels Retirees from the district of bitem. A grant of 52,672 euros from the Tarragona Provincial Council It served to raise the last of a single floor on the site of one of the narrow streets of this local entity of less than just 1,150 souls, attached to the Catalan municipality of Tortosa. Without walls or pavement, still with a gravel floor, and with a square hole in the ceiling that suggests what should become the entrance of light from an interior patio, the building, of no more than 250 square meters, has two years waiting for funds to undertake the “second phase”, which is still a euphemistic way of saying that he is waiting for the money to be able to finish the work and finally serve as a meeting place for the elders of Bítem.
