Strike, PSOE and Guardia

I was in the Town Hall this morning to have a meeting with Candido and have shown below the information I gleaned from this meeting.

Firstly almost all the street signs have been ordered. They will be delivered after the holidays and Andreas has been tasked with helping people get to know the new street names and numbers. I offerred to assist him in that task when it is needed, as it will obviously take quite a bit of time. It is intended to number the streets in the normal way with odds on one side and even on the other.

I asked if they thought that this would assist the Correos and was told quite firmly that they did not expect it to make any difference. It was explained to me that the Correos is government run and they want to get rid of it into private hands. It is therefore in their interests to have it run on the cheap and they are not bothered about the lack of service. Why else would they close La Alfoquia Post Office, which has been in existence for 30 years, at a time when there are 50% more residents! At least the Town Hall will have done all in their power to make it easier for the Correos.

The situation with the Plan General is still not good. I asked about the delimitation plan. This is the plan which segregates land which can be used for urban land from that which cannot. It was explained to me that in December 2006 the full council (including 4 PSOE councillors) agreed within the norms of Spanish law a plan of delimitation for the land. In order for this to be legal and proper a set of documents has to be prepared including such things as technical and archeological  papers. This was done as stage one of the process, stage 2 was the publication of the Plan for the public in case anyone wished to complain. This was done and left for an extra 4/5 days. Then on the day of the Pleno meeting to give final approval to the plan the leader of the PSOE party approached Candido and told him that not only would they not be voting for this plan but that they had also been instructed, on pain of consequences, not to assist in any way by the main party office in Almeria. Had they not taken this path we would not be in the situation we are now in. This issue is now before the court of Granada and it usually takes 5 years for that court to deal with cases. So assuming it was promptly referred then it would seem we may have to  wait until 2010/1 for that case to be dealt with.

There was slightly better news on the other cases listed by the Junta and I was told that we expect 50% of cases to be heard in the next 2 months and it is believed that we will win them all.

I was given some other examples of the petty minded and vindictive way in which the Junta exercise power over the local councils which failed to return PSOE majorities. These included the fact that they have tried to stop the works being done in Zurgena so that over the Xmas period and into the New Year the town would be a mess. In order to keep us from making improvements to the town they keep making spurious requests for documents, bills etc anything which takes time and therefore prevents the offices of the council tackling things they want to.

Whilst I was there one of the Town Hall staff interupted our meeting to hand Candido a letter which was obviously from the Guardia Civil. He asked me jokingly whether I thought it would be a Xmas card or a summons. I suggested there was no way it would be a Xmas card. It did however turn out to be a quite nice earlty Xmas present as it was a notification that the Guardia office at La Alfoquia, which is currently a temporary satellite office and only manned for 8 hours a day, is to become a full time office with a commensurate increase in Guardia personnel. It gave no date for this but I am led to believe it will not be too long. Candido did say he was aware this was going to happen but could not inform anyone until receipt of this letter.