Sport For All (26 November)

If you are a government minister, let’s say for tourism and sport in the Balearics, you would hope that you would have both some tourism and sport to be in charge of and both some tourism and sport on which you could lavish your ministerial munificence.

Tourism there is, but it has to scrape by on only a few quid for promotion, though when your ministry is in fact 32 million euros in the red, it’s surprising that there is a ministry at all.

Then there’s sport. Or rather, then there isn’t any sport.

Linked to the ministry is one agency from within the Balearic Government’s tourism organisation that has been allowed to escape the axe for being either pointless or up to its neck in misappropriation of funds, or both.

The Fundación Illesport came to public notice recently, as it was invoices to this foundation that first alerted the world to the inconvenience with which the Duke of Palma now has to contend. The foundation was handing over great wads of cash in return for what would appear, allegedly, to have been very little.

But the foundation has long been there, doing something about sport, which mainly seems to have involved spending the tourism ministry’s money, of which there now isn’t any. It’s a reasonable question to ask why a foundation has been needed when presumably they could just as easily have got some secretary in the ministry to prepare cheques, so one has to assume that the foundation has some altogether greater function.

It does, or did. It was still really only a case of doling out ministry money, but the foundation is (was) responsible, among other things, for sorting out financial assistance to town halls for their sports facilities. An agreement of May this year should have realised the release of 24 million euros to different municipalities, only eight million, therefore, short of the ministry’s total debt for this year.

Should have, because now the foundation says that it hasn’t got any money to meet these grants. A town hall that stands to suffer most from the lack of funding for sports facilities’ improvements is Sa Pobla; to the tune of 338 thousand euros. The mayor is threatening legal action.

There had already been an indication that money for sport was not going to be forthcoming, as a couple of weeks ago Santa Margalida had been told that it was not going to get the quarter of a million it had been promised.

As a consequence, sport, in the case of sport to support the health and welfare of the island, is being allowed to trail in well down the list of all the runners and riders that the government has to feed and nurture.

There are, though, two types of sport: that for the people of Mallorca and that for tourists. The tourism and sport minister, Carlos Delgado, took office with a brief that included giving a new impulse to sport in Mallorca and the Balearics. If there is an impulse, it appears to be directed at sport for tourism. When announcing recently that there was going to be only a negligible amount for tourism promotion, he did also refer to initiatives to further develop three “puertos deportivos”, one being that of Alcúdia.

What this would entail wasn’t made clear, and even though only three “sport ports” are being targeted, the priority for sport, where the ministry is concerned, seems clear enough, and it isn’t sport for the locals.

Sport usually finds itself losing out when governments come to having to make tough decisions. Perhaps we should be grateful that there aren’t proposals to sell off the playing fields and sports areas and hand them over to developers. Yet.

But sport plays a central role in the life of the island’s communities. One only has to scan through pages of the Spanish press on a Monday to get an appreciation of the scale of sport and its organisation in Mallorca. Pages of results, reports and photos of teams for football, basketball, athletics, whatever; men and women, boys and girls.

Sports tourism is one of the Big White Hopes of tourism diversification. It deserves to be prioritised. But for every development of a resort’s watersports, for every possible new golf course or – the new vogue – polo field, and for every route set aside for German oldsters to clack along with Nordic walking poles, sport at the local level should not be neglected.

The tourism ministry and its foundation will know that sport will just carry on without the injection of new money. But nothing lasts without investment. As a slogan once had it, “sport for all”. And not just for tourism.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Going To Waste (25 November)

Between the two town halls of Alcúdia and Sa Pobla, the company Tirme, which provides rubbish-treatment services on Mallorca, is owed in the region of 4.6 million euros. The amount is divided roughly evenly between the two administrations, a difference lying with how much interest they both owe (Alcúdia more than Sa Pobla).

This is not the first time that Tirme has gone in pursuit of outstanding debts from town halls. At the end of May, Inca got a demand for not far off two million. Just one strange aspect of the non-payments is that they relate to the period from 2008, in the case of Alcúdia, and from 2009 where Sa Pobla is concerned. How many other town halls are similarly in debt to Tirme? And if there are others, but even if not, how does a company operate when it is not being paid such vast sums?

Alcúdia and Sa Pobla are both negotiating payment terms, and the respective administrations are of course blaming the previous administrations. Which seems fair enough, but, just as one wonders how Tirme copes with not being paid, one wonders how it is that town halls can apparently just not bother paying. Sa Pobla is also in for about 1.35 million to three other service providers, including the rubbish collectors.

One gets the impression that the whole business world in Mallorca – that which has anything to do with the town halls or other public bodies – is surviving on the promise that they might one day actually get paid. But promises don’t amount to a great deal and they certainly don’t amount to cash flow or reassurances to lenders, if they are applicable.

Tirme, though, isn’t quite like other businesses. Most would find 4.6 million plus the couple of million from Inca and whatever else might be outstanding rather too much debt to bear. Tirme doesn’t. Or doesn’t appear to. This may be because of who owns it – Endesa, Iberdrola, Urbaser and FCC. Tirme is also a monopoly, and its concession for waste treatment lasts until 2041.

Tirme’s monopoly position is understandable in that its operations do demand heavy investment, so it has every right to be able to expect to have a period in which it can make a return on its investment. But not everyone is happy with this monopoly nor with how Tirme prioritises its investment and its operations.

A key part of Tirme’s remit is recycling. Mention the R word and you can be sure that one organisation will prick its ears up: GOB, the environmental pressure group. In August, GOB issued a statement attacking Tirme for what it claimed was the company’s concentration on incineration as opposed to recycling. GOB maintained that recycling plants were operating well below capacity, while the ovens were going full pelt in optimising as swiftly as possible the investment on incinerators at the Son Reus plant in Palma. Moreover, reckoned GOB, the incineration was allowing for the generation of electricity that was being commercialised.

GOB has accused Tirme of engaging in misleading marketing where its operations are concerned and has accused the Council of Mallorca, which, and truly bizarrely, has managed to extract a reduction in the cost of waste treatment for 2012 of slightly less than two centimos, of complicity.

But then, the story of waste management and treatment is far from straightforward; you wouldn’t expect it to be, because nothing ever is in Mallorca.

In January this year, the anti-corruption prosecutors embarked upon the so-called “Operación Cloaca”. This had to with allegations of false accounting centred on waste management operations sanctioned by the Council of Mallorca. Of those detained at the time, and I would make it perfectly clear that Tirme was not implicated in the Cloaca investigation, was an executive with FCC-Lumsa, one of the companies with a concession for recycling collection; FCC, which is a shareholder in Tirme.

Cloaca highlighted the dual system of waste collection (door to door as well as from green points) which had resulted in effect in payment for recycling doubling. Cloaca also revealed that town halls had been pressurised by an individual at the Council of Mallorca into adopting this dual system.

What Cloaca also highlighted was the sheer complexity of arrangements for waste management on Mallorca. Perhaps town halls simply don’t understand what it is they are meant to be paying for. Now, though, Alcúdia and Sa Pobla accept that they have to pay Tirme. But you wonder how many other town halls owe the company and whether the reason for non-payment has been more than just an inability to pay.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

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.

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 Land Of Make Believe

I’d like to take you back in time. It was a time of the three-day week, unworkable governments that changed every few months, virtual national bankruptcy and massive union unrest. It was also a time of extremely long hair and flared jeans.

It was during this time that I was at university. In common with some others, it was a self-contained community, a campus. Some miles from the city, it operated under its own rules, a mini-state not immune to the wider world, but one in which a government existed together with forces of agitation and institutions bound up in sub-governments, committees, constitutions and rigged elections.

The forces of agitation were led by the students union, generally a collective of the far and less far left. Collegiate in make-up, the university had, in addition to the main union, eight union-ettes: student bodies for each college.

The government comprised university administrative bureaucrats and academics of various political colours. The lecturers had their own set-ups: the senior common rooms attached to the colleges, the more strident among their number being those who were well-known to Moscow and others who would have considered Enoch Powell a liberal.

The government practised a system of democracy in which there were innumerable committees and a senate. To the colleges were devolved responsibilities for this and that, while the colleges’ individual unions – the junior common rooms – mirrored precisely the make-up of the main union. There was a president, a vice-president for internal affairs, one for external affairs, a treasurer, and so on.

Union meetings were interminable gatherings often devoted to the minutiae of whether ultra vires payments for supporting the Shrewsbury 3 or the Iranian 91 were constitutional or not. They always were, because the union politburo would make sure that they were. The mini-me unions, the junior common rooms, would concern themselves less with matters of national or international agitprop and more with securing the compliance of the rank and file. Bread and circuses: free beer, rubbish music acts and weekly discos.

No one ever actually questioned whether this system was right or not. It just was. It existed within a make-believe world. The campus was like Patrick McGoohan’s Prisoner island, with one major difference – dissent, if not actively encouraged, could not be repressed. The only time it was, on any scale, was at the end of a two-week occupation of the administration building. The university had the temerity to put up campus rents so that what were little more than peppercorn acquired some salt. In we all went, but after two weeks of less-than-hygienic conditions, it was a relief when plod crashed through a wall one night and carried us out. And plod were no doubt delighted at the overtime payments.

Quite what the occupation cost, heaven alone knows. But then money wasn’t really much object. The university, its students, its staff existed thanks largely to UK government and taxpayer beneficence. It was its own world, one in which politics were entirely divorced from real life. It was a land of make believe, a play thing for the mid-70s’ wizards of “Oz” magazine.

The point of all this is that Mallorcan and Spanish politics have a lot in common with those days. The make believe was that forged after Franco, a world of idealistic institutions, decentralisation, duplicated responsibilities, inhabited by all manner of political groups and parties, supported by the seemingly endless generosity of first Europe and then a Spanish state with little comprehension of control.

No one thought to really question this system. It was allowed to grow, but it has, despite some 36 years of being, not cast off the immaturities that were evident in university days. Now we have situations in which a union leader can insult a political party, as Lorenzo Bravo of the UGT has insulted the Partido Popular government, calling them pigs. Back in the day, plod were those, while anyone who wasn’t a card-carrying Trot was a fascist, and this, the fascist insult, is hurled around in all directions as well by the competing elements in the Castilian-Catalan argument.

The system is akin to that of the university. Governments embroiled in issues of questionable payments, the town halls and the Council of Mallorca mirrors of government, dealing in the bread and circuses of the fiestas with their booze, rubbish music acts and discos.

The days of bread and circuses are over, however. The money’s run out. Real life for Mallorca and Spain has started. The playing and the make believe have to stop. Whether they will, though, is questionable. Here come plod.

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.

Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay

Payback time. As reported in “The Bulletin” (17 August), the Council of Mallorca faces a likely demand from central government to pay back subsidies for road building that didn’t happen and which were used for other purposes.

The Council faces an additional demand. The national finance ministry is owed 9.8 million euros by the Council. It is the shortfall between money that was paid on account by Madrid in the expectation that tax revenues generated by the Council would meet the estimate of this payment and would be handed over to the finance ministry.

This system of advance payment, a sort of cash-flow measure if you like, works only if the local authority is in a position to pay it back and only if the estimate was realistic in the first place. The estimate may have been realistic, in historical terms, but the demand for the 9.8 million relates to the year 2009. The year of crisis taking hold. Tax revenues plummetted.

The Council is far from being the only local authority which faces a demand for payment. The town halls of the Balearics are into the finance ministry for a total of 32 million euros. Palma owes 7.9 million, and the five largest towns in Mallorca after Palma – Calvia, Manacor, Llucmajor, Marratxí and Inca – all owe over one million euros; very nearly two million in Calvia’s case. Of other towns, Alcúdia owes most – close to 800,000; Pollensa faces a demand for 350,000, Santa Margalida for 439,000. The only municipality that is owed by the ministry is Escorca – all of 1,600 euros.

How are the local authorities going to pay these demands? If they are all like Santa Margalida, they won’t be paying. Its mayor says there isn’t any money. Of course there isn’t. One estimate of Santa Margalida’s debt puts it at eleven million. The Council of Mallorca would seem to have little hope of handing over virtually ten million, not when it is technically bust and over 300 million in the red.

The demands have led to all manner of accusations as to where the blame lies. In Santa Margalida it is the fault of the previous Partido Popular-led town hall administration. For Manacor’s PP mayor it is the fault of the PSOE socialist national government for not having reformed local authority financing. Pollensa’s PP mayor says that central government got its sums wrong.

Wherever the fault lies, extracting repayments out of many town halls is going to be a tough call. Manacor, for example, faces, in addition to over a million being demanded of it, the unexpected cost (around one million itself) of complying with the idiotic demolition of the Riuet bridge in Porto Cristo. And it’s not as though the towns can just wave their hands, plead penury and expect to not have to pay. Higher authorities than the town halls have been known to seek legal and financial redress from the municipalities and indeed from mayors for non-compliance with certain orders; as Antoni Pastor, Manacor’s mayor, knows only too well.

What does the finance ministry do though? Does it withdraw advance payments and expect future tax revenues to cover the repayment? If so, then the town halls will be bankrupted. In addition to the debt which hovers over most of them are the constraints placed on them in respect of seeking credit. Tax revenues down in any event, how do they continue to function?

The system of public finance gives the impression of being close to collapsing. While there is a sense of chickens coming home to roost and of previous profligacy now being punished, this does nothing for assuring that public services are maintained. One ray of light in the mess comes from what Alcúdia’s lady mayor has to say, that some formula will be worked out. It may well be, and it may well be that her colleagues in the PP nationally, if and when they assume office after the election in November, will find an accommodation. A question would be, what sort of accommodation? The PP is more minded to slash public funding than the current government.

Where the Council of Mallorca is concerned, its repayment burden simply adds to its precarious position and to its highly questionable viability. And what exactly was it doing spending state money on projects other than those for which the money was intended?

Perhaps this was it though. The Council, as with the town halls, had just looked upon the state as their sugar daddy and had expected that the good times would continue to roll along with the cash, whether fully accounted for or not. Unfortunately, daddy bet the house and lost, and the IMF and others have attributed Spain’s financial troubles less to shaky banks and more to the amounts spent by regional authorities.

The local authorities can’t pay and probably won’t pay, and so Spain’s financial woes just deepen.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Limited Appeal?: The Pollensa Music Festival

Better late than never. Used as one is to the tardiness with which fiesta and fair information is given out, the lateness with which that for this year’s Pollensa Music Festival was officially announced takes some beating.

The music festival isn’t like the fiestas. It is an international event, supposedly. It attracts international artists at any rate. And booking international artists and arranging for their appearance doesn’t happen with the same minimal preparation as that required for, for example, fiesta “sardinadas” that occur every year, on the same day and with the same musical accompaniment.

The programme should have been released weeks ago. It finally emerged, on a scrappy PDF on Pollensa town hall’s website on 29 June, three days before the first concert. No fanfare. Nothing. Not even a poster, and the website link still the same as that for 2010. To describe the pre-publicity as rubbish would be an insult to garbage the world over. It is very poor.

A mystery with the lateness with which the programme has been published is that it was already known. On 14 June, the line-up was announced on the website of a Spanish newspaper. It bears no difference to that which now appears on the town hall’s website.

Yet, the day after the 29 June announcement, we learned that the programme had to be put together in a short period of three weeks. Given the previous press announcement, this doesn’t quite chime, but to be fair the lateness of the official announcement may have more to do with finalising contracts rather than finding performers.

There are mitigating circumstances for the delay and for the reduction in the number of concerts. In 2009 there were twelve, last year there were eleven. This year there will be eight. (A later concert in September by the National Orchestra of Spain might yet be added.)

The circumstances are financial and political. As far as the latter is concerned, the previous Pollensa town hall administration is being blamed for having not done anything. But the funding of the festival is shrouded in some confusion. One report suggests that the budget is only 30,000 euros lower than 2010; previous ones had suggested it would be just over a half and that the primary cause of the shortfall was the non-receipt of a grant of 180,000 euros from the tourism ministry.

Whatever the financial or political reasons, the fact is that this year’s festival, which did seem at one point to be in doubt, is the fiftieth. For such a celebration the organisation has, at best, been disappointing.

Despite the reduction in the number of concerts, quality, we are also told, has not been lost. While quality doesn’t mean that you might have heard of the performers (and as one who is hardly a classical music aficionado, I haven’t heard of most of them), there is none of previous years’ quirkiness, insofar as you can describe Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson or Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley as quirky. Of this year’s performers only the flamenco singer José Mercé registers with me.

Mercé and the Israeli singer Noa are identified as two acts with appeal to a wider public. Possibly so, but perhaps the fiftieth anniversary is a time to take stock and assess what the music festival should all be about. While the setting of the concerts in the cloister of Sant Domingo is unquestionably fine, the programme and the atmosphere of the festival are too elitist.

The festival is described as being the Balearics’ most prestigious. But prestige doesn’t necessarily mean appeal. What does it really do for Pollensa or for Mallorca? Does it, in itself, attract much tourism? No one has probably ever sought to find out. Carlos Delgado, the new tourism minister, has said the festival will continue to get support, but in Delgado we trust to take a good look at some sacred cows.

The festival would benefit from a broader programme, a sort of fringe if you like. There might also be sense in integrating it with what goes on in Sa Pobla at its jazz festival where genuinely international artists such as McCoy Tyner have appeared, and for free.

If the festival is so prestigious and if financing is such an issue, then why not find major sponsors? Thomas Cook can sponsor an Ironman triathlon in Alcúdia, so why not a sponsor of such size on board for the music festival? Despite the prestige, it isn’t perhaps that interesting an event for sponsors. And you come back to the whole issue of tourism with a cultural bent. Sports tourism yes, but some stuffy concerts for a small minority?

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.