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.