Enrique Pérez: ‘Betancuria is being badly run, with the procurement body bypassed’

Enrique Pérez has denounced the award of a contract to build a wall near Betancuria Town Hall. The work was budgeted at more than €500,000, over 10% of the municipal budget, which is close to €2.9 million. This makes it impossible for the contract to be awarded without the full council’s approval.

Nationalists raised the issue a couple of months ago, calling for the full council to approve the work’s progress payment certificates. But that has not happened, Pérez said in an interview on La Voz de Fuerteventura, broadcast on Radio Insular. ‘These are very serious issues, which concern us enormously because plenary decisions are being ignored and, above all, the Town Council’s procurement body is being bypassed,’ he said.

Poor management and no Betancuria Historic Capital Awards

Pérez also said the council was losing grants, ‘just as it did in the previous term’. He pointed to lost accessibility funding that could have been used to improve access to the Town Hall and municipal cemetery, as well as funding for Social Services and the library.

He also urged the local government to submit an updated cemetery project so that the Fuerteventura Island Council could carry out its renovation under PICOS. The project is more than a year overdue: the island authority requested the document in August 2023, but it has still not been provided. ‘There are few burial niches left, barely ten,’ Pérez warned, noting that the project is expected to take around ten months to complete and that ‘Betancuria has an ageing population’.

Pérez said the ‘lack of management’ was clear, arguing that important services such as household waste collection and the municipal car park had been outdated for two years.

The staff establishment (RPT) is also ‘only half done’, and nothing has been done about the Betancuria Historic Capital Awards. Pérez said Canary Islands president Fernando Clavijo approved funding ‘at the eleventh hour’ to promote the award, ‘but to this day, the council has not put forward anything’.

Poor relations and a split

Pérez said Marcelino Cerdeña had focused his administration on eliminating the Town Council’s debt but had neglected services to improve residents’ quality of life. Sports and after-school activities were sidelined, ‘a situation that led many young people to leave the municipality because they had no access to them’, he said.

He also rejected the account given by Betancuria’s former mayor to explain his departure from Coalición Canaria and the creation of a new party, Unidos Por Betancuria. Pérez recalled that five of Fuerteventura’s six town councils, governed by Coalición Canaria, supported a fair distribution of the REF, benefiting the town’s coffers.

In his view, ‘the reality is not as Marcelino tells it’; rather, the split was due to poor relations between Cerdeña and Marcial Morales, who was then president of the Fuerteventura Island Council. He described it as a matter of ‘personal egos and individual resentment’.

Pérez said the Fuerteventura Island Council ‘has never acted against Betancuria’. He concluded that proof of this was the island authority’s investment of more than €4 million in projects in the municipality during the current term, under PICOS. These include the renovation of the Town Hall, the cemetery and the Morro Velosa Viewpoint, among other works.