I Want My Independence

One thing you can say about the whole Puerto Pollensa pedestrianisation fandango is that at least it is giving people an interest during the otherwise quiet months of the off-season. Maybe there should be an annual controversy to keep everyone occupied once the clocks go back.

Anyway, Garry Bonsall tells me that there is a proposal for one lane of the road to be closed, a compromise of sorts. Maybe this would work, maybe not. It seems to me you either have pedestrianisation or you don't, with restricted access for deliveries as a sop to businesses that might be affected if you do indeed have it. Different forms of arrangement, though sought by the mayor, are attempts at post-hoc rationalisation of the questionably rational, in that the key question is why the pedestrianisation was ever conceived in the first place. As mentioned the other day, you have to go back to the summer of love - 1967 - for the answer, as it was then that the original plan was established, together with that for the new road.

Mayor Cerdà, it would appear, is only following orders. Perhaps someone should point out to him that the Generalisimo has long been begging at St. Peter's Gate. It's not as though all bets were off after 1975, the new road being one of them. One can justify that on the basis that there was a degree of foresight in appreciating the sort of traffic levels that Puerto Pollensa would come to expect. But because a plan was created 41 years ago doesn't mean that it has to be executed. I am wondering whether that law of historic memory, the one designed to rid Spain of symbols of the Franco era, could also be applied to traffic projects drawn up during that time, though I suppose you would have to unbuild the new road if it were.

It is a nonsense to argue that a scheme dreamt up in the sixties automatically has to be applied. Back then, the Spanish Government could have done pretty much as it pleased with scant or little regard for whatever anyone thought. Just nail the decree to the forehead of a convenient passing peasant, and then bring in the bulldozers. Times change, most obviously in respect of the volume of the public voice, which takes us back to that European law on consultation. Projects can no longer be foisted onto a local community without attention being paid to its views, but the mayor failed to consult widely from the very outset. Even if it were not his duty to have done so - though developments suggest it was - there was a moral case for it. Rather than adopt a seemingly dogmatic stance, one formed with the support of a plan from El Caudillo's time, he should have thrown it open as a full debate, not just about the pedestrianisation but about a scheme for the town as a whole. The closure of the frontline road is a piecemeal solution to a much wider problem - that of the infrastructure and quality of life of all of Puerto Pollensa. But he didn't, and now he's copping the flak.

Garry also tells me that there is an idea doing the rounds for a vice-mayor for the port. This shouldn't be necessary. A mayor should be for the whole town or not at all, and heaven alone knows what conflict this might give rise to, especially if they were from different political parties. But it is a measure of the apparent impotence of officials responsible for the port and of dissatisfaction with the administration that this is being advanced. For God's sake, this is a town that cannot muster 20,000 inhabitants. How much officialdom does one need? Yet there exists within this proposal the evidence of tensions and resentment between the port and the "pueblo". Pollensa is not the only town to suffer from this. Consider the four municipalities that comprise the tourism zone of the north - Pollensa, Alcúdia, Muro and Santa Margalida - and in only one case, that of Alcúdia, might it be said that the resort and the old town enjoy a degree of harmony. It is no coincidence that there is little or no physical separation between Alcúdia and Puerto Alcúdia. In the other three cases, there is not just the distance of kilometres, there is a distance also in administrative and psychological terms. In Santa Margalida such is the level of dysfunctionality that the opposition on the town hall is holding separate public meetings after the ruling group switched them from the evening to the morning when of course fewer people can attend. Much of the antagonism there stems from differences of opinion regarding projects as they affect Can Picafort. It's almost as though there has been a UDI. Perhaps that is what is needed for all the resorts, as the main beef with all of them and with the businesses in them, is that it is they, the resorts, which generate the revenues for the towns. This is no more so the case than in Muro and Santa Margalida where the "pueblos" have little or no tourism.

Ivory towerism, maybe that's it. And a touch of snobbery as well. The ancient towns, the ancient pueblos look down on the coarse commercialism of their resorts and, while grateful to extract every last tax, treat them as second-class. Vice-mayors? Maybe there should be separate mayors and separate budgets.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Squeeze (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pehHNJWKf3g). Today's title - in 1967 she was offering her love and appeared in the film with the same title, and she was back in the '90s with this cracking song.

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