English Speakers: Mayors and town halls (11 November)

“Mayor Talks To British Community”. This shock-horror headline hasn’t appeared, but should have. A mayor going along and talking to a bunch of Brits in a Brit-owned bar. Whatever next?

The mayor in question was Tommy Cifre. Two Tommy Cifres, there are only two Tommy Cifres present among Pollensa town hall’s cadre of councillors, but only one can be mayor, and it isn’t the one from the Mallorcan socialists. The mayor came, he spoke in a sort of English and conquered those who were concerned about the quality of the tap water.

It’s not, however, that you expect him to be perfect in English. Why should he be? Some Mallorcan politicians can apparently do English reasonably well. President Bauzá, or so it has been reported, impressed tour operators and others at a World Travel Market lunch with the “fluency” of his English. One who didn’t, it would seem, was the Mallorcan Joan Mesquida, who is only of course the national government’s tourism secretary and formerly the tourism minister. You can’t have someone able to communicate effectively with representatives from one of Spain’s principal tourism markets; that would just be pointless.

But it doesn’t matter because there are always interpreters and translators. Mesquida may be able to call on such services, but the town halls can’t necessarily. Take Alcúdia, for instance. A while back I received an email asking if I could put into serviceable English the Spanish description of the Roman town. Sure I could, and did, and sent it back with a note asking where I should send my invoice. Not that I seriously anticipated a positive response; and so I was therefore not disappointed to receive no response.

Though Alcúdia town hall now has a superbly scripted English explanation of Pollentia and the monographic museum, is it right that it should get one gratis and as a favour? Seemingly it is, and I hope all the British and English-speaking tourists are grateful. But is it also right that there appears not to be anyone actually employed or contracted (and paid accordingly) who can do English properly? And I do mean properly and not just in a somewhat better than putting a translation through Google fashion.

I don’t expect mayors to speak English. It was good of Cifre to give it a reasonable crack, therefore. In many Mallorcan municipalities, ability in English or another main foreign language would be almost completely unnecessary, but in towns such as Alcúdia and Pollensa – especially Pollensa – then I do expect some decent English; not by the mayor but through the systems of communication that exist. Ten per cent of Pollensa’s resident population is British; the town has an overwhelmingly British tourism market.

The counter-argument is, of course, that all these Brits should damn well learn the lingo, always assuming we know which lingo is being referred to; and in the now Partido Popular-dominated Pollensa town hall it is still stubbornly Catalan. But dream on; most will never learn the native sufficiently well and certainly not sufficiently well to engage in the political process.

A mayor coming to speak to the British community (and it must be said that it was more than just the Brits) is an aspect of this process. A question about tap water may sound trivial in the scheme of things, but in fact it isn’t; town halls do, after all, have legal responsibilities for sanitation.

But more than this, and this is where the whole argument about voting rights for expatriates tends to founder, is the fact that if communication is not understandable, then how can expatriates ever be expected to be anything like fully engaged in the process over and above a small minority that takes an interest regardless of the language? Ahead of the local elections in May, in which expatriates were entitled to vote, where were the communications in relevant languages? Perhaps there were in certain municipalities, but I was unaware of any.

Depending on municipality, Mallorca should display a multi-lingualism that reflects the realities of its population. English and German, probably French and Arabic; these might be considered the essential additional languages. Such reality is coming to be accepted; in Pollensa I know that local parties, and not just Cifre’s PP, are keen to engage with the English-speaking population. So they should.

It’s easy to dismiss expats as being uninterested in local politics. Many are, but many are not, especially at the local level. For a mayor as engaging as Tommy Cifre to come along and engage the Brits – in English – took some balls. He may have ballsed up his English, but so what? He made the effort.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Don’t Walk This Way: Camí de Ternelles

After years of legal wrangle and several weeks spent in a courtroom in Inca, a judge has arbitrated that the property through which the Camí de Ternelles in Pollensa passes is indeed private. This old way or road has been the focus of a battle between ramblers and Pollensa town hall, on one side, and the owners, the March family of bank fame, on the other.

To summarise, the judge has said that the property passed into private hands in 1811 and that on this property a way does not exist that is in the public domain. The judge has added that the town hall must remove the walk from its brochure of local rambles but has also advised the owners to respect the currently restricted access of up twenty walkers a day. The town hall may appeal.

The judge’s decision is hugely important. It has potential ramifications for other walks not just in Pollensa but in other parts of Mallorca. Indeed, it is that important that it might serve to kill stone dead many of the ambitions that exist, since the awarding of World Heritage status, for opening up the Tramuntana mountains to more tourism.

In the immediate Pollensa area, walks such as those with access to Boquer could be threatened. And the threat resides in whether land is ultimately determined as being private or in the public domain, a threat that extends along the Tramuntana range and from the legal battle that has been fought at its northerly, Pollensa end.

What was generally overlooked amidst the euphoria of the awarding of World Heritage status was the fact that most of the Tramuntana range is privately owned, or claimed to be. This does not in itself prevent walks, so long as some accommodation is arrived at with owners (and Pollensa town hall seems to think that it might yet be able to do just this with the March family). But if there are no agreements, much of the range becomes off-limits, and the prospect arises of years of legal disputes in order to try and secure rights of way.

It is such a prospect that must seriously curb whatever marketing there might be in mind for the Tramuntana. It would be a massive mistake to start promoting walks, only for other town halls to discover, as in Pollensa, that they have to then scrub them.

However, the issue with many walks is not simply one that relates to land ownership. There is also the sea.

The Ternelles walk ultimately leads to the Cala Castell, a cove to the west of Cala San Vicente. The walk also provides access to the ancient fortification of the Castell del Rei, only a short distance from the coast. The judge has made clear that, privately owned or not privately owned, because the property forms a link with the coast, free access to the sea must be supported. This stems from the principle enshrined in the Coasts Law (yep, that again) which guarantees free access to the public.

The limitation of twenty people a day was, in effect, a compromise established by the Council of Mallorca. It was predicated not so much on the question of land ownership but on access to the sea. By emphasising this aspect, however, the judge has surely opened up the possibility of a legal challenge to the Council’s compromise. And invoking the Coasts Law is what makes the Ternelles saga even more interesting.

This is because of a move that has gone almost completely unnoticed (not least by myself, until a couple of days ago), namely that the regional government is set to assume responsibility for the coasts in the Balearics. This would involve a transfer of such responsibility from the Costas Authority and would involve the management of the coasts. But it could also well mean ordinance. If so, this raises all sorts of questions of the type that have been raised regarding hotel exploitation of beaches and also of public access to the sea and whether this would indeed be guaranteed – the privatisation question.

Yet the regional government, aware of the need for tourism development that embraces heritage and culture and that exploits the Tramuntana’s new status, can ill afford to have obstacles in the way of accessing important historic sites such as the Castell del Rei. Consequently, Ternelles has the potential to become an issue not between Pollensa town hall and the owners but between a Partido Popular government and the most powerful banking family in Mallorca.

Of course, this may not mean a collision course; it could actually help to smooth the situation. But one thing is almost certain. The last has not been heard about the Ternelles walk. It has way, way further to go.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Sanity In Pollensa: The auditorium

Finally, some sanity prevails at Pollensa town hall. The previous madness had not been claimed by myself alone; far from it. The Alternativa per Pollença party has been one that has made constant reference to the lunacy. At least now it cannot be said that the lunatics have taken over the auditorium.

Several years down the line – the project has been on the drawing-board for eight years – Pollensa town hall has decided to withdraw from an agreement with the regional government for the building of an auditorium in the town. By doing so, it hopes to recover funds from the government to the tune of just over 200,000 euros a year that it has not been receiving since 2007. The reason why it has not been getting these funds is that they were waived in return for 4.5 million euros from the department of the presidency to go towards the auditorium’s building.

Whether the town hall will get its money back, we will have to wait and see. As the government hasn’t got any money and has, in any event, been playing hardball with the divvying up of cash through the so-called co-operation fund, Pollensa may have to wait. At least, or so one presumes, it will receive the money over the next five years of what was meant to have been a ten-year period.

Apart from the loss of annual funding, the madness of the auditorium project has been evident in different ways. Firstly, why was it ever deemed necessary at all? Its necessity lay with the vanity of a town hall that wanted a me-too auditorium because other towns (e.g. Alcúdia) have one and with the grandiose schemes for public works dreamt up under the regional presidency of Jaume Matas.

Secondly, where was the control of the project? It was not officially put out to tender. Its design and budget (ten million euros in total) were those of one architect.

Thirdly, of this budget, why was the tourism ministry involved? It was due to have contributed five million euros to its building, a contribution that was withdrawn a few days before the regional elections in May by the ministry of the former administration. But what did the auditorium have to do with tourism? In Alcúdia, where its auditorium has never operated at anything like capacity, the building contributes precisely nothing to tourism.

The tourism ministry was the wrong ministry, just as it has been the wrong ministry for giving out grants to events such as Pollensa’s music festival (or not giving them out, as it has turned out). The music festival, like the auditorium, is something for the culture ministry; the festival’s contribution to tourism is minimal.

Each ministry has its own budget, and the tourism ministry, in effect bust, had little alternative but to withdraw its funding. But it should never have been saddled with the responsibility in the first place. If you wonder how it is that the ministry can be so ineffective when it comes to tourism promotion, here is part of the reason; it has been lumbered with things that shouldn’t be on its manor.

The Alternativa has been laying into the previous mayor, Joan Cerdá, for his “obsession” with the auditorium project and the current mayor, Tomeu Cifre, who, in previous administrations, did not speak out against the project. And now Pollensa will have neither an over-ambitious auditorium nor a far less ambitious multi-purpose hall, which is what the Alternativa believes the town does need.

It may well be right, but the experience of Alcúdia, with the over-budget and under-utilised fiasco that is its Can Ramis building, suggests that Pollensa might be better off forgetting about some other scheme as well.

The one saving grace of the “crisis” is that hare-brained projects, cobbled together with nary a thought as to what their use or return might be (did anyone calculate a reasoned return on the auditorium investment?), have to be put on ice or killed off. One day though, a new project for an auditorium will probably return; if it does, it still wouldn’t mean it was necessary.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Mayoral Wonga

How much should a mayor be paid do you suppose? To answer the question you have to know what he or she does exactly, which admittedly isn’t easy to get a handle on. A mayor does a lot of signing of things, puts in any number of appearances around and about, shakes a fair number of hands, chairs a few meetings, gets his or her photo taken pretty much every day.

There is a bit more to it than this and the mayor, more or less, is responsible for however many lives there are on his or her manor. It might be said, therefore, that a mayor should command a decent pay packet.

The question as to the mayoral salary has become an issue in Sa Pobla. Here the new mayor, Gabriel Serra, admitted a while back that the town hall was to, all intents and purposes, bust. Against this background and a further admission that the town hall will invest in no building works at all other than to perform urgent maintenance, the opposition’s claim in early July that the mayor was going to be trousering nearly 4,400 euros a month did cause a slight rumpus. Assuming this entails 14 monthly payments, as is the wont locally, then Serra was due to be on over 60 grand a year.

Sa Pobla, it might be noted, is a smaller municipality than its neighbour Alcúdia, a tourism town where the town hall and therefore the mayor’s remit is somewhat greater than a place that exists for little more than agriculture. The lady mayor of Alcúdia, Coloma Terrasa, will receive a salary the same as her predecessor – 2,100 euros net per month. On the face of it, there is something of a discrepancy with what Serra was said to have been going to be earning.

Said to be, because Serra has published his pay slip. It shows he’s getting 2,137 euros net, quite a deal less than the opposition had claimed, and pretty much identical to the salary of Alcúdia’s mayor. How the amount has come down by 50%, assuming it was ever intended to be nearly 4,400, one doesn’t quite know, but down it has indeed come.

In Pollensa the mayor is getting 2,914 euros a month gross, which puts his take-home at roughly the same as Serra’s. So the mayors of the three towns are now all making the same as each other; gross salaries, amended to take account of the two extra months in the year, of something over 40 grand.

Is this a fair amount? Is it too much, or is it too low? Who knows?

A full-time post in public service, and in the cases of Alcúdia, Pollensa and Sa Pobla, this means running towns with 19,000, 17,000 and 13,000 people respectively, should be reasonably well paid, especially if it is the only source of income. But this isn’t necessarily the case of course. Many a town hall official, mayor or otherwise, tends to have business interests as well. A prime example was Muro’s one-time mayor, Miguel Ramis. His interests? Well, there was the small matter of the Grupotel chain that he founded.

Ultimately, whether a mayor is worth his or her salary cheque depends on how well he or she performs, and performance can mean whatever you want it to, especially when the mayoral office is a political appointment and can count on the support of the relevant party (or parties) to ensure that performance is spun as being effective.

Yet the town halls are in financial crisis, not solely due to current economic hard times. Their tardiness in making payments to suppliers is the stuff of legend, and pre-dates economic crisis. But this should surely be a key measure of how well a town hall is being run or not. Alcúdia and Pollensa, for example, have been shown to typically take up to six months to make payments; you will hear of examples where payment has been much later (if at all).

It is when companies are faced with cash-flow crises of their own, thanks in no small part to being unpaid by municipalities, that one can understand there being some disquiet as to salaries that are paid to mayors, and not just to mayors. Full-time officials other than a mayor can expect to receive 1,800 euros per month net. And then you have the costs of town halls’ personnel, which have gone through the roof since the start of the century.

A mayor can in theory be held to account. But widespread concerns exist as to a lack of transparency at town halls. Mayors, and other officials, should be made to show that they earn their money. It’s a performance age, but performance as a measure has been slow to catch on in Mallorcan local government. The town halls and the mayors need to publish what they are doing, when and why they are doing whatever it is they are doing, and what they expect the results to be. Then at least we might be able to judge whether they are worth the money. And you never know, maybe this might show that they are worth more.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

All Night Long: Fiesta parties

So there will, after all, be a party on the final night of Pollensa’s Patrona festivities. Public pressure helped to ensure this, the last town hall meeting having been packed by those in favour of it. The mayor had been criticised for not having consulted in seeking to ditch the event.

Here we go again. If it’s Pollensa, it must be a case of the town hall not consulting. There are some things it should consult about, such as the pedestrianisation plan for Puerto Pollensa that was scrapped primarily because it had failed to consult, but there is surely a limit to what it is obliged to consult about. Or perhaps, in the case of fiestas, the people’s parties if you like, there should be an obligation. There again, they didn’t consult the people of Puerto Pollensa about what has turned out to be a programme for Virgen del Carmen that is like little more than a village fete.

The night party is going ahead, but economic constraints will mean that it will finish earlier than previously, at 2.30 in the morning of 2 August. Economic constraints or something else? The deputy mayor, Malena Estrany, hopes that by ending the party a couple of hours earlier there will not be a repeat of the botellón street party and unseemliness that has been associated with the event. There remains the suspicion that cost was a secondary factor in the town hall’s wish to call the event off, and that the botellón was the primary factor.

But now, having backtracked, the town hall would wish us to believe that lopping two hours off the party will help to stop a grand old booze-up. Are they serious? The strangeness of this logic is made even stranger by the town hall’s intention to ask neighbouring towns to check that people being bussed in to the event from the likes of Sa Pobla or Alcúdia aren’t carrying drink.

This presumably means the local police in these towns being called on to search and confiscate. A question arises whether they have any right to do so. Drinking alcohol in the street may be against local laws, drinking on a bus may also be, but carrying drink? Moreover, drink can be obtained in other ways. The botellón isn’t always just a bunch of people turning up at random with a carrier-bag with a couple of cheap bottles of vino.

Elsewhere in Mallorca, one party has been scrapped precisely because of the problems that a botellón can create. In Pòrtol, following incidents last weekend, a DJ party for this coming Saturday is to be dropped and probably replaced by a dance orchestra.

But also this coming Saturday, a party which had been dropped last year and which had acquired greater notoriety than the Patrona party is to make a re-appearance. Sa Pobla is organising the Districte 54 event as part of its Santa Margalida festivities. This was banned last year on safety grounds and because of complaints about noise and the state that the town got into thanks to its accompanying botellón.

Districte 54 has been one of the biggest of the fiesta night parties. It was first launched in 2003 by the then Partido Popular administration in the town. Who is now the new mayor of Sa Pobla? Biel Serra of the Partido Popular. Last year he criticised the decision to scrap the event, pointing to its economic benefits and to the fact that it brought the whole island to Sa Pobla.

There is more than just a hint of the populist behind the decision to resurrect Districte 54, and Pollensa’s mayor may also have begun to have had second thoughts about how a decision to ban the night party might impact on his popularity, a mere month into his new term of office.

Serra’s belief that Districte 54 has economic benefits contrasts with the economic constraints said to have been influencing the Pollensa decision. Which brings you back to the question as to how well these economic benefits are measured, if at all, and to a further question therefore, which is, despite the costs of staging events, do they actually generate a sufficiently greater revenue?

Local businesses would argue that they do. And this is the nub of the issue with the botellón parties which occur at Patrona or Districte 54. Yes, they can cause unpleasantness but they are really about potentially depriving businesses of revenue; hence the measures that are being introduced to try and limit their impact. People can put up with noise and mess if the tills are turning. And you can bet that those who packed the Pollensa town hall meeting weren’t just revellers.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Our Man In … : Resorts’ delegates

Puerto Alcúdia has now got itself a delegate. Lucky old Puerto Alcúdia. The post-election re-organisation at Alcúdia town hall has deemed a delegate to be necessary, when previously it hadn’t been. Does the port need a delegate? Maybe it does, but it has done well enough up until now without one.

Having delegates for towns’ coastal resorts hasn’t exactly been a great success elsewhere. They have been viewed as being toothless or simply lackeys of the mayor. This was the case in Can Picafort, for example, while in Puerto Pollensa the ex-delegate was considered, not to put too fine a point on it, to be a joke. The lack of respect that Francisca Ramon commanded came to a head when she addressed demonstrators in June last year. The volley of abuse that came back made it clear that she was thought to be “stupid”.

The delegates for the resorts are at least a recognition by town halls that their resorts do have specific needs. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the very existence of delegates has raised expectations that they might actually do something, when they are hamstrung by having no real authority or responsibility. In Puerto Pollensa the call has long been made for responsibility and also for a separate budget.

The logic of such a call is that the resorts should become their own administrative units. Because of the specific needs, there would be some sense to this, but any sense soon evaporates when you consider the added bureaucracy, costs and potential for duplication.

Were the electoral system to be such that councillors were voted in on the basis of wards, then there would automatically be voices for different parts of a municipality, but this is not how it works. The creation of delegates for the main resorts reflects the absence of such a mechanism, but it is also discriminatory. In Alcúdia, for example, what about Barcarès, Alcanada and Bonaire? Don’t they count?

The lack of geographical representation exacerbates discontent, such as that in Santa Margalida. Son Serra de Marina lies some seven kilometres away from Can Picafort and even further away from the town. Residents have complained that the village has been all but abandoned, and there have been examples – inadequate police presence, the deplorable state of the sports centre – which don’t help to refute their complaints.

At a more general level, there is an issue as to what councillors are responsible for. Depending on its size of population, each town hall is obliged to take care of certain services. These obligations are not mirrored by what councillors are charged with.

Up to a point this is reasonable enough. The towns have a wider responsibility for general welfare than those stipulated by law. There is no legal requirement, for instance, to take responsibility for tourism, but it would be distinctly odd if they didn’t.

Responsibilities such as those for public works and maintenance are clear enough, but some are less so, while the way in which these other responsibilities are jumbled together to form an individual councillor’s portfolio leads you to wonder what process is ever used for arriving at what can seem contradictory.

In Muro, for instance, there is a councillor in charge of education and culture and the town’s music band. Another looks after environment, youth activities, radio and television (what television!?) and transport. Yet another oversees sport, the police and traffic, and relations with the church. Go through this little lot, and there isn’t always a pattern. Is radio and television not culture? Might sport be a youth activity?Would traffic and transport not have some common ground? Indeed, what is meant by transport anyway? School buses? Public transport is not a responsibility of small authorities such as Muro.

It is not as if the responsibilities mirror those higher up the political administration food chain. Regional government has combined agriculture with environment. In Muro agriculture is lumped in with tourism. In Alcudia there is still responsibility for language policy, the regional government having scrapped a specific directorate for it. But what is most evident from the Muro portfolios is what isn’t evident. Unless the mayor has taken on personal responsibility for just about everything the town is really meant to look after – services, building works, finance etc. – and has a particularly hard-working governing commission, then no one appears to be in charge.

You are left with an impression, therefore, that town halls find things for councillors to do. Some are important, some aren’t. But where they all fall down is in the fact that their chief generators of income and employment, the resorts, get, at best, a delegate and not a councillor with real clout.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Town With No Mayor

One day he was still there, the next he was finally gone, whisked away and hurtled into the oblivion of cyberspace. But for eleven days longer than he should have been, Joan Cerdà had remained mayor of Pollensa. According to the town hall’s website anyway. The photo of the “batle” (Catalan for mayor) continued to be that of the smiling face of the departed Joan; a photo that had surely been taken before he had become mayor, as he didn’t do a great deal of smiling once he was. For over a week, Joan was stubbornly fixed to the website’s batle slot next to the lime-green banner declaring “Som Pollença Municipi Turístic”. The batle of the som.

It wasn’t only myself who, on not infrequent visits to the town hall’s website, found it slightly odd to discover that Joan was still lingering. The A party, A for Alternativa but which might better stand for Awkward, also found it strange, and so told the press who duly brought the matter to the world’s attention. No sooner made to look a bit silly, the town hall removed the photo.

But where once was Joan is now no batle to be seen. Has no one a photo of Tommy Cifre, not even an old one? He has after all been mayor before. The mayor’s spot is now a link to a street map. I clicked on it, just for something to do. I didn’t move the map, really I didn’t, but zoomed in, zoomed in and zoomed in. And there, in centre frame, once the map was truly legible was Joan Cerdà, the Plaça Joan Cerdà. Spooky.

The town with no mayor is now also, in its virtual internet world, minus any political representatives at all. The political organigram has disappeared as well. Organigram, I ask you. Jobs for the boys and girls. The A party has also made a fuss about it not having been changed. The new administration has been talking a good talk about transparency, but it hasn’t got round to posting info as to who now has their feet up on which town hall desk.

You could say that it was just a case of being a tad slow (and by the time you read this the site’s missing mayor and organists will probably have been found), but the town halls’ websites are intended to be a key means of communicating with towns’ citizens. Which is why when you go to them and don’t find what you are looking for, they can at best be a bit disappointing, always assuming you can make head or tail of Catalan, which you normally need to, and thereby confirm your disappointment.

Not updating the website is just one little local difficulty that the new administration has to contend with. With Joan no longer in the picture, except having his picture stay on the website, the hope for the good people of Pollensa was that all would suddenly become calm and orderly. They hadn’t counted on Tommy Cifre and his number two Malena Estrany being cast in the role of Laurel and Hardy. “That’s another fine mess you’ve got me into, ‘Strany.”

To be fair, it hasn’t been her fault or Cifre’s. They couldn’t have been expected to have known that Endesa would come along and remove the electricity meter from the public swimming pool in Puerto Pollensa and cut off the supply, even if the recent history of problems with paying Endesa’s bills would have made them know that not all was going swimmingly at the public baths.

It is not their fault that they have inherited the ongoing battle of the beaches in Puerto Pollensa and the new company that Cifre has told to get on with complying with its obligations. It is not their fault that if you go to the town hall’s website and expect to find information for the Pollensa Music Festival programme (which typically starts in early July), you won’t find it because the programme hasn’t been sorted out. And it is only the fiftieth anniversary of the festival this year. Its founder, Philip Newman, must be turning in his grave and playing a lament on his violin.

It is not their fault that only slightly less well-established than the music festival is the sailing school of Sail and Surf. Forty years it has been in Puerto Pollensa, and suddenly some jobsworth comes along and finds it has been there all this time. It must stop, said mayor Cifre, who then said it could continue. Something about licences. It always is.

It’s just like old times. Old times that are not even yet a fortnight old. Things will get better. Give them some time. Four years, for example. But meantime the A party will continue to make a nuisance of itself, it will continue to bombard my email inbox with photos and circulars to do with what the town hall’s not doing correctly, and so life will go on as normal. As normal as it can ever be in a town with no mayor.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Magic Wand

The “vara”. Wand, rod, pole. Take your pick. A magic wand. Spare the rod. Poles apart. They all seem somehow appropriate in the aftermath of the game of pass the parcel to see who ends up unwrapping the mayoral wand.

New mayors may hope that they can wave their wands and make all the problems disappear, but the problems are only just beginning, and are mainly those of fractiousness.

The municipalities of Alcúdia, Pollensa and Santa Margalida highlight how fractiousness consumes the operations of town halls. In Alcúdia’s case, it will be new; for Pollensa and Santa Margalida, it will be business as usual.

The tensions that will now exist are only partly to do with party politics. They are more personal than this. And no more so than in Santa Margalida where Miguel Cifre has been handed the baton of mayoral office once again, fourteen years after a motion of censure resulted in his being kicked out of office.

Santa Margalida is a town of mutual dislike among its leading political lights. It’s why Cifre and his party of change couldn’t attract any other party with which to coalesce. He’ll run the town hall, if run is the right word, with a minority three short of that which was required. He’ll be a lame duck (aptly enough for a town which stages the annual nonsense of the duck throwing), and one despised by the Partido Popular in particular.

Another lame duck is now the second in command at Alcúdia, despite the fact that she abstained from giving any candidate for mayor her support. Carme Garcia’s decision to cosy up to the Partido Popular, one that went against the wishes of her party, the Mallorcan socialists, has unleashed a tsunami into what had been a rare oasis of calmness in the politics of local towns.

At every opportunity, at every meeting of the town hall, she can now expect to be hounded, attacked and vilified. And she will have brought it on herself. Photos of the councillors in Alcúdia, taken after the meeting to select Coloma Terrasa as mayor, were very revealing. Terrasa was smiling, wand in hand, ex-mayor Llompart was grinning and PSOE’s Pere Malondra was laughing. Garcia looked even more frumpish and put-upon than usual.

Llompart and Malondra further exposed her decision to side with the PP as an act of opportunism. It was rumoured that they would try something, and so they did. Malondra was nominated to be mayor. Had Garcia voted for him, a natural political ally for someone who claims to be of the left, then Malondra would have become mayor. She didn’t. The boys of the Convergència and PSOE were laughing at her, and so it will be for four years.

Pollensa doesn’t have a lame duck, it has a Tommy Cifre installed as mayor. Two Tommy Cifres, there are only two Tommy Cifres. Thankfully. It’s confusing enough with two of them. One Tommy Cifre, there’s only one Tommy Cifre in the PP. The new mayor, and not the one Tommy Cifre from the Mallorcan socialists. Cifre, together with the La Lliga lovely, Malena Estrany, will hope to restore some order to Pollensa town hall. They surely can’t do any worse than what passed for administration under Joan Cerdà.

Fortunately, both Cifre and Estrany are respected, which was not the case with Cerdà who lost any semblance of respect as a result of the fiasco over the aborted pedestrianisation in Puerto Pollensa. It was this which turned him into a lame duck for much of his period of office. The charge of lack of consultation that was levelled at him (among other charges) is to be addressed by Cifre. He has promised “citizen participation”, and a system of monthly meetings with associations across Pollensa is meant to come into being.

The PP-La Lliga coalition, one short of a majority, will be praying it can rely on the support of the one Unió Mollera Pollencina councillor. If not, and despite what respect there might be for Cifre and Estrany, then the fun and games in Pollensa are likely to continue.

But fun and games are what we want. They are what makes Mallorcan politics the theatre of the absurd that it so often is. A stage for illusionists who in every town conjure up a generally misplaced sense of their own importance. They wave their wands on new regimes and in a puff of smoke the old ones disappear. That’s magic.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Sitting Pretty Vacant: Pollensa

It was like the awards ceremony when the winner doesn’t show up, or the dinner when the guest of honour cries off. This might be over-egging things, but Joan Cerdà’s absence from the ranks of mayoral candidate in the Club Pollença deprived the occasion of some fun. No more will Joan be the pig in a poke of a public haranguing. But he will remain; a Banquo’s ghost, haunting Pollensa for years to come.

How many mayoral candidates does it take to change a light bulb? As many as you want, and they will still manage to get the lights of Puerto Pollensa’s bypass and church square the wrong way up or simply wrong. How many mayoral candidates does any town need? It is quicker to name those residents of Pollensa who are not standing for mayor than to name those who are.

Even without Joan to liven up proceedings and to be the target of metaphorical rotten eggs and tomatoes lobbed in his general direction, the malcontents of Pollensa opposition politics were only too happy to try and generate the normal fun and games that surround Pollensa town hall. The collective slagging-off was just like old times. In fact, just like any time over the past four years of Cerdàdom.

The one candidate currently warming a seat in the town hall, PSOE’s Maria Sastre, was asked about the value of her sinecure – sorry, sorry, size of her salary. Only 1900 euros a month, she retaliated. But salary is not what is important. It’s all about effectiveness. Cue chortling.

The naughty boys of the opposition, Garcia of the Alternativa, Sureda of the Esquerra and Cifre of the Mallorcan socialists, have been the ones who have habitually been caught sniggering at the back of the room during council meetings.

One of them, Cifre, questioned the amounts paid on town hall staff – 40% of the entire budget, always assuming you know which budget is being referred to; the town hall has only recently signed off on the 2009 accounts. Or were they 2008’s? Everyone seems to have lost track.

What do these staff members and councillors do precisely? Garcia reckoned a full-time fiestas councillor was unnecessary. A full-time post would be better reserved for tourism.

Ah yes, tourism, and Puerto Pollensa. Remarkably, someone (Cifre) made the point that it is up to the town hall to make the place look pretty. It is the tour operators and hoteliers who should be attracting the tourists. Hallelujah. When all the talk is made about local authorities doing this and doing that in order to promote to tourists, the obvious point is overlooked; that it is not the local authorities that really matter, but the tour operators. Cifre should be given the job as tourism minister.

Puerto Pollensa has its own party, the Unió Mollera Pollencina, and it naturally enough has its own mayoral candidate. Nadal Moragues deplored the pathetic image of the port and called for the Moll to have its own budget and responsibilities. It’s not the first time the suggestion has been made, but the rumblings of potential UDI are growing louder.

The new chico on the block, the virtual unknown, mini-Cerdà of the Convergència Whatever They’re Called Nowadays said that he would give out his mobile number so that citizens could call him. It sounds like a dangerous thing to do, but as no one knows who he is, he’ll probably be ok. And I’m not telling you his name, just in case. He won’t win anyway. Surely he can’t? Not AC – after Cerdà.

Such openness had already been trumped by Pepe Garcia. His Alternativa could just as easily be called the Transparencia. So clear and clean is Pepe, you can see right through him. Which is not meant to sound as it does. He’s a thoroughly decent bloke, and he has published his full financial and earnings situation as a way of demonstrating his transparency.

And that was about it. The candidates for the self-styled worst town hall in Mallorca will wait a few days to discover their fate. Oh, but there was one I’ve not mentioned. Malena Estrany of La Lliga. She is the best-looking of the lot. But given the vast numbers standing for office, she, as with all the others, cannot be said to be sitting pretty. The job’s vacant, and the race is wide open.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Never Mind The Quality: Meaningless systems for tourism

There are certain words which, because of their widespread and widely unthinking usage, have lost any sense of meaning. Quality is one of them. Everyone does quality. “Our meat/fish/desserts/full Englishes/beers (use as applicable) are of the highest quality.” Oh, for the bar or restaurant which advertises its quality as being rubbish. Or the resort which promotes itself as being the worst or most maligned: “Everyone hates us, but we don’t care.”

None of this applies to Alcúdia, Pollensa or, mystifyingly, Artà. Quality abounds in all three, unlike, at present, anywhere else in Mallorca, other than Palma. Each can boast of quality. The whole of Menorca can also do some boasting, as can Formentera and Ibiza. Soon, you would imagine, everywhere in Mallorca will be proclaiming quality, and so the meaning will go out the window, if there was any to begin with.

I am not making this qualitative assessment of the three towns/resorts. It is being done by something called SICTED, the Sistema Integral de Calidad Turística en Destinos. It’s an unfortunate acronym. Is sick Ted pervy Edward or infirm Eddie? Sick Ted, Father Ted: “Would you have a look at this quality here, Ted.” “Not while I’m vomiting, Dougal.”

SICTED is, so says its website, “a project for improving the quality of tourist destinations that is promoted by the Spanish tourism institute (Turespaña) and the Spanish federation of municipalities and provinces”. I’m sure you feel better for knowing this, as you will feel better – less sick – for knowing that the sick note from SICTED is a sign of a destination’s “commitment to tourist quality”. And signs you can get, it would appear. One with a T with a gap and a sort of Smiley curve that brings to mind the TUI logo.

They should mind the gap. If it’s quality they’re after, then they should learn to cross their Ts properly. But a broken T is, I suppose, all the more aesthetically and graphically-designed pleasing, and it would seem that it will be making itself known outside “distinguished establishments” in the SICTED towns: the odd restaurant or hotel and, in the case of Alcúdia, its police station.

I confess to being utterly confused. Not so long ago, there was all this stuff about the Q quality mark, something also to do with Turespaña. Now there’s this one. Destinations and businesses can apply to be assessed for receiving their sick note and subject themselves to surveys of customer satisfaction. So convoluted does SICTED appear, the FAQs (frequently asked questions) on the website run to 102 in total. If you can wade through this lot, then you probably deserve to get what you’re meant to – your commitment to tourist quality and your broken T.

But as the mere word quality loses its meaning, so do exercises in granting quality. How many more of them are there? And what on earth do they mean? And for whom?

Alcúdia’s SICTED, so says the citation on the website, is on account of, among other things, “beautiful beaches with fine sand”, “hidden coves”, and “very diverse peoples who form a tranquil environment”. These will presumably be the same diverse peoples whooping it up in the bars and entertainment centres of The Mile of an evening, scratch-card touts, and lookies selling dodgy DVDs and/or crack on the streets.

Pollensa “combines sea, countryside and mountains”. It has “solitary coves” as opposed to hidden ones; someone’s been at the thesaurus. No mention of dog mess on the streets, not getting the management of the beaches sorted out on time for the start of season or protesting business owners marching through Puerto Pollensa.

Then there is Artà. Its inclusion is a bit mystifying, as it’s not exactly a place with a lot of tourism. It’s off-the-beaten-track coastal Mallorca, but it does, like Alcúdia, so goes the SICTED blurb, have beaches with “fine sand”. There is, possibly though, more of a reason for Artà having its SICTED than Alcúdia and Pollensa, and this is because it isn’t particularly known for its tourism. Otherwise, what really is the point of all this?

The answer, one guesses and obviously so, is a desire for a general lifting of quality, a response to the threats posed by perceptions of greater quality in rival destinations. Fair enough, but does this require the rigmarole that SICTED and the Q mark demand? It should be obvious where quality failings may exist, and failings there are, even in Alcúdia and Pollensa, despite their having passed the sick test.

Who takes any notice? Tourists? It’s very doubtful. And were all other towns/resorts in Mallorca to apply for and be awarded the same status as Alcúdia, Pollensa and Artà, then even less notice would be taken. It is quality becoming meaningless because everywhere has it, or so it is claimed.

Never mind the quality, because no one’s paying any attention.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.