Something’s A Bit Fishy: La Gola

They were trawling dead fish out of La Gola again. Hundreds of young sea bass suffocated in the water of the canal, creating a fine old take-away for the seagulls which came from miles around to feast.

This is the small La Gola lagoon in Puerto Pollensa. Together with its accompanying park, it is referred to, by politicians who rush to make such environmentally righteous statements, as the green heartbeat of the resort. Or something like this. It’s tosh, whatever it is. I have previously used La Gola to denote an item of expenditure, one of questionable sense. “It’ll cost you a lagola, mate.” 800 grand, give or take the odd thousand; what it cost to do whatever it was they did. They being the collective of the town hall and regional government. (There is another cost quoted in respect of La Gola; one substantially greater – four million.)

To be fair, some parts of the park look reasonable enough. The problem has been, ever since it was officially opened and before this, keeping it in order. Out of order, it has been a haven for graffiti-ists, botellón-ists and all manner of other ists. Amidst the periodic disorder, they built a visitors’ centre. It’s not completely useless, as it does give information about bird and wildlife in other parts of the island, e.g. the Tramuntana mountains. But whether twitchers or others flock pilgrim-like in great numbers to it in order to avail themselves of its wisdom, I really couldn’t say.

It is the case, though, that La Gola and the wetlands of Albufereta and the now newly-reopened Can Cullerassa finca, a few kilometres along the coast, are important in attracting the keen birdwatcher. La Gola has recently been visited by an obscure heron, one that caused great excitement among the feathered-friend-fancying fraternity.

The appearance of the heron might be considered evidence of the green heartbeat actually beating. On the other hand, it might not be, and the sea bass would probably be inclined to agree that it wasn’t. The fish were fried, it would appear, because no one has got round to properly dredging the canal. Clogged up, sea water can’t get in adequately.

La Gola is something of a metaphor for what occurs elsewhere in Mallorca, one that relates to a division of responsibilities that the relevant bodies seem either unaware of or unable or unwilling to do anything about.

Pollensa town hall, the usual suspect when anything goes wrong in Puerto Pollensa, will doubtless get it in the neck over the sea bass and for the general upkeep of the pond, but, for once, it isn’t the town hall’s fault. The water, indeed the whole park, come under the auspices of the regional government’s environment ministry. The town hall is meant to keep the park up to scratch, which is a sore point among the locals, but as for the water: not its job.

Ultimately, it’s probably the responsibility of the national Costas authority, a division of the central environment ministry, but which devolves responsibility back to its Balearics wing. This, as with other regional Costas wings, devotes its energies primarily to knocking things down, such as buildings on beaches, rather than keeping things shipshape.

The division of responsibilities in the La Gola case should be clear enough, but the environment ministry is being charged, by locals in the port, with not giving sufficient priority to its maintenance or to removing sand that is dragged in from the sea. It could well be that, governmental coffers having been silted up, it has to give priorities elsewhere.

A lesson of La Gola is that they went in, like some invading force in Iraq, all environmental guns blazing but failed to consider the longer-term consequences, such as maintaining it once all the money had been spent or seeing the need for the sappers to be set to work re-trenching the canal. It may just have been bad luck. Money running out and all that.

Meanwhile, the division of responsibilities means that the town hall will be mistakenly considered the guilty party by many, while the real culprits are hiding away in a bunker in Palma.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Pollensa’s Plague: Its town hall

A couple of days after last June’s demonstration against the alleged neglect of Puerto Pollensa by the town hall, a restaurant owner who had been on the march said to me that Pollensa was the worst town hall in Mallorca. It was a theme that was revisited when I spoke the other day to someone from the port who has been active in attempting to get improvements from the “ayuntamiento” for some years. Despite my suggestion that Muro town hall, with one ex-mayor now banged up for 12 months for vote-rigging and another disqualified from office for ten years, might deserve some prominence in the dishonourable roll call of local authorities, he insisted that Pollensa remains the leader.

The current administration in Pollensa has, since being elected and appointed in 2007, stumbled from one crisis to another, largely to do with its management (such as it has been) of Puerto Pollensa. So great is the divide between the port and the town hall that when a crisis comes along for which it (the town hall) might be deserving of some sympathy, it manages instead to further alienate the port’s residents, to the extent of a “denuncia” being lodged with the Guardia Civil.

An ecological disaster is occurring in Puerto Pollensa. This may sound like an exaggeration, but the impact of the loss of landscape and visual charm can be dubbed thus. Residents and tourists alike want, demand even, the attractiveness of the natural world, but when it is being killed off as rapidly as it is, then one has to wonder as to the harm that may be caused to economic life by the destruction of palm trees.

Puerto Pollensa has been hugely affected by the actions of the “picudo rojo”. The weevil’s appetite for palms is such that in one avenue alone over one hundred palms, all the palms in the avenue, have been infested. The sympathy that the town hall might have had stems from the fact that the control or even the elimination of the weevil is far from straightforward. The mayor has suggested that little can be done. Up to a point he is right, but this acceptance has merely highlighted the fact that the town hall’s own attempts at control have been poor, to the point of incompetence. It has managed to exacerbate the situation and to make Puerto Pollensa the “epicentre” of the beetle “plague” which has now spread to neighbouring towns.

The charges levelled against the town hall’s competence in respect of the palm beetle go back some time. In 2008 the delegate for the port was told that palm trees in the Gotmar area were showing signs of being destroyed. She said there was nothing wrong with them and so nothing was done. Now you have a situation in which the actions of the town hall in trying to stem the problem have resulted in the denuncia made to Seprona, the Guardia’s environmental investigation unit, and the call for the head of the town’s services department, Martí Ochogavia, to be sacked.

What has helped to spread the beetle has been the way in which the town hall, rather than sending infested trees that have been cut down away for incineration (as it should have done), has been packing them in plastic and dumping them in the Llenaire area of the port. This has created a breeding ground for the beetle which has then escaped from what has been punctured plastic. When the town hall decided it would set fire to the cut-down trees – in open fields – this merely gave the beetle a fright and off it flew. It is possible for the weevil to travel up to four kilometres in one go; hence it has spread and colonised trees outside of the port. And there is the potential for even greater damage, one of the beetle skipping species of palms and infesting those not currently at risk, including the “palmito”, the one tree that is native to Mallorca.

Residents in the port hold Ochogavia responsible. And he has form, such as with the accusation that was reported widely some time ago of nepotism in his having granted a relative’s company the contract for street lighting. There is now also a question as to what has happened to the budget, 100,000 euros, that was set aside to tackle the palm beetle. Pollensa’s mayor, Joan Cerdà, has said that there needs to be more financial assistance from the regional government, and has pointed to the cost of arranging for a crane, a gardener and labourers to cope with just one tree. Nevertheless, residents are keen to know how the budget has actually been spent.

The town hall administration, with elections looming, seems to have been stung into action. The new street-cleaning operation, at a cost of 800,000 euros per annum and with a machine dedicated to cleaning Puerto Pollensa’s streets, was unveiled before Christmas. The town hall has also announced two projects in the port – worth 600,000 euros in total – for upgrading waste and water pipes and for placing rubbish containers underground. But this might all be a bit late.

The disaster of the palm beetle is something of a metaphor for a different type of disaster – what the residents of Puerto Pollensa see as the disastrous management of the port by the town hall. For the administration and for Sr. Ochogavia, a plague on both their houses.

* At the “pleno” at Pollensa town hall tonight (27 January), there will be a call for Sr. Ochogavia’s dismissal.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Have Your Say: Balearic Government opinion seeking

The Balearic Government is giving people their say. An internet campaign that goes under the title of “tú tienes la palabra” offers the possibility to cast opinions as to various initiatives undertaken by the government. The very use of the familiar, informal “you” form (“tú”) gives the campaign the air of consultant-led marketing puffery styled in the language of the intimate; citizens are the government’s friends. Of course they are.

It’s all a bit of catch-up. Together with the informality, it is designed to make the government appear inclusive and to make the citizen participative. It’s an approach that has been doing the rounds for years, one that sprang up in the US and which was couched in the managerialist vocabulary of the consultant – accountability, social responsibility, customer-focussed, stakeholder. It has taken it’s time to catch on in the Balearics where the notion of citizen participation has only recently started to be given some prominence or respect.

If you are inclined to, you can visit the part of the government’s website that enables opinion to be cast – balearsopina.caib.es. There you will find the various initiatives, new ones appearing on a daily basis. Anything from support for immigration to cultural promotion to statistical information that the government pumps out and to the politics of language. An interesting aspect of all this, where I’m concerned at any rate, is that I seem to have written about most of them at some point; some of them on many an occasion.

Whilst the drive towards inclusiveness and participation is not in itself unwelcome, certain questions arise. One is how much interest there is. The answer, given the number of responses to questions regarding initiatives already posted, is not very much. The campaign started on 10 December. Only now is information regarding it surfacing in the media, probably in recognition of the fact that there has been so little response. There isn’t a lot of point in inviting opinion and not telling anyone that you wish to. Perhaps further opinion should be invited as to how well the government (and other public bodies) publicise things. I think we know what the answer would be.

A second question is what happens with the information. The fear is that it will simply add to one of the initiatives, that of statistical information provision. Percentages will be released in great abundance to the press who will slavishly reproduce them, and this will be the end of it. There will be an appearance of involvement and no more.

This government campaign is not the only attempt at getting citizens to participate or to voice opinion. Pollensa town hall, for example, invites comments and suggestions. You send them by email. And then? Who knows. One can guess at the sort of thing that they will include, as they are voiced often enough. Dog mess, street cleaning and so on. For a town hall that took little practical notice of some thousand people marching in the streets of Puerto Pollensa to complain about town hall neglect, you would have to wonder what notice they would take of emails from “disgusted of the Moll”. The town hall now has its perfect response in any event, having finally got round to rolling out its 800 grands’ worth of annual contract for new cleaning equipment combined with satellite positioning technology to show where is being cleaned and which the citizenry of Pollensa will eventually be able to consult via the town hall’s website.

A third question that arises, or would were there any real interest in this government campaign, is the potential for manipulation. Not by government but by respondents. The weakness of online voting and opinion is the same weakness that one gets with text voting. It is a weakness that stems from a strength of both the internet and SMS: that of whipping up support, be it for an “X Factor” contestant, a Sports Personality or a political initiative. The democracy of inviting opinion, of quasi-referendums via new technologies, is to also invite the tyranny of minorities masquerading as majorities. It is the modern-day take on John Stuart Mill’s tyranny of the majority in a democracy, without even the certainty that it is a majority view.

For the moment, however, there is no fear that this will occur with the government’s campaign. So uninterested does the Balearics citizen appear to be in voicing his or her opinion that in one poll – on equality and women – a question as to the prioritisation of a protocol for detecting, preventing and drawing attention to sexist violence drew precisely no responses.

If the government is serious about citizen participation and counselling public opinion then it needs to rethink its online campaign and probably relaunch it with much stronger publicity and a message that you don’t just have your say; your opinion will actually matter.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Pedestrianisation plan and the Don Pedro

As flagged up on 25 July, Pollensa town hall yesterday approved the plan for a development in the Ullal area of Puerto Pollensa which would also involve the developers undertaking the pedestrianisation of the resort’s “front line”. The town hall has also approved the demolition of the Don Pedro hotel in Cala San Vicente.

Kicking Off Again? Pedestrianisation in Puerto Pollensa

Two years after the scheme to pedestrianise the “front line” of Puerto Pollensa between Llenaire and the centre of the Moll was abandoned, it is about to make a comeback. The impetus for its return is an agreement to develop land in the Ullal area of the town (around and near to the Pollensa Park hotel). As reported in “The Diario”, the town hall will give this plan the go ahead this coming week. The developers will be able to build residential accommodation on some 100,000 square metres of land, in return for which they will also undertake the pedestrianisation scheme. According to the mayor, all parties which were informed of the plan last week, which seem to include the revolutionaries (as referred to yesterday), are in agreement. Given what happened last time the pedestrianisation scheme reared its head though, it’s hard to imagine that there will be unanimity this time round. Apart from anything else, it will mean that all traffic gets diverted along the bypass, which was built as part of the same plan as that for the pedestrianisation, envisaged as far back as the late sixties. Other revolutionaries, notably those of Gotmar who protested loud and long a couple of years ago, will surely not be taking the latest news lying down.

The plan is a potential minefield. Though the building development will be in the vicinity of wetlands deemed of ecological interest, the green light for it has come from the Council of Mallorca which has reclassifed the land as a so-called area of territorial reconversion (ART), which is the same provision that has been applied to areas in Bonaire and Puerto Alcúdia, prompting developments in both instances, the second of which includes what is widely presumed be and largely already built, but mystifyingly unconfirmed, a Lidl supermarket. Despite the Council’s acquiescence, one can yet anticipate objections from the environmental lobby.

What seems curious about this plan is that it doesn’t directly address the tourism problem that was highlighted yesterday. If it is indeed the case that Puerto Pollensa needs more hotel stock, might the development not be better served by sticking up a new hotel or two? This said, the chances are that a number of the new houses will end up as holiday lets. For a resort with a high dependence on residential tourism, this might seem fair enough, though it runs counter to the attitude at government level towards the letting business and would provide far fewer additional tourists than a hotel would.

Meanwhile, the same ART is being invoked to finally put the Don Pedro in Cala San Vicente out of its misery. It’s been a long death, but it would now seem that the demolition is going to occur; just a question as to when. This has been said for years, but now it seems as though it will happen. Much as the demolition might now appear inevitable, nothing ever runs smoothly, least of all in Pollensa; and so it may still also be with Pedestrianisation 2010.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Squeezing Lemons: Puerto Pollensa wants a tourism study

The protest against conditions in Puerto Pollensa at the start of June has led to there being meetings between the town hall and representatives of businesses and residents in Puerto Pollensa. At the latest meeting the town hall decided to invite the university in Palma to investigate reasons why the port has been losing tourists and its image (as reported in “The Diario”).

When all fails, call for a study, but there is an obstacle: Mayor Cerdà doesn’t know who will pay for it. Which just goes to prove that money can indeed not buy everything, if you don’t have any. There is an awful lot of everything in Pollensa that cannot be paid for.

The mayor says that he doesn’t know whether the tourism problem is as a result of tourists deciding against staying in the port, of the tour operators going elsewhere, of a bad image or of inadequate hotels. Things he might know are that there has been a recession, that the British market, upon which Puerto Pollensa is over-reliant, has been particularly affected, that the pound has been weak. Any study would have to establish that there was a discernible downward trend BC (before crisis). If there wasn’t, then the mayor might think a study to be a waste of time and money, were there any. Its mere suggestion smacks of a dose of PR and of attempting to mollify the Moll revolutionaries.

There is a colossal amount of garbage spoken about the apparent malaise that has laid Puerto Pollensa low. Garbage being one aspect, along with what you’d rather not tread on and even, for God’s sake, road signs not pointing people in the direction of the Moll. All of it is irrelevant. Cerdà’s unknown unknowns are not all unknown. Funnily enough, yes, tour operators do choose to go elsewhere. And perhaps some of the hotels aren’t up to scratch. Perhaps there simply aren’t enough hotels, a point to which the revolutionaries have alluded.

But let’s suppose a study were to be conducted. What do you think would happen? Chances are that the hefty tome of a report would gather dust on shelves somewhere in the improved town hall building that cost a mere couple of million euros along with shelved tourism ideas, such as the lunatic notion of using the image of Agatha Christie to promote Puerto Pollensa. Whatever happened to that? Let me hazard a guess. It would have cost an arm, a leg and the equivalent of several studies by the university to dosh up for image rights.

Research is fine. Nothing wrong with it, so long as it is meaningful and might result in some action. Trouble is that in Puerto Pollensa they do research, and have done so for some time. Remember? June 29 last year – “The Lemon Tree”. That was about the questionnaire of tourism satisfaction that does the rounds. I doubted then that anything was done with the survey results, and I doubt it even more now. So, Pollensa town hall, go find some money down the back of the mayoral sofa, hand it over to the university and wait for another bunch of lemons. Ridiculous.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.