Improving Gotmar - After All These Years

The residents of the Puerto Pollensa urbanisation of Gotmar received an early Christmas present when Pollensa town hall announced five days before Christmas that it would start work on improvements to the urbanisation in the new year. These are improvements which have been a long time in the waiting.

The story of the urbanisation and the problems it has encountered go back to its development in the 1960s. As with other urbanisations, it was essentially a private initiative. There are numerous examples elsewhere of urbanisations created by private companies or individuals which had to wait many years before they were "received" by town halls, i.e. they officially became local authority responsibilities with all the attendant services these imply. In Gotmar's case it was to be some fifteen years after the development was started before it was "received" by the town hall.

Over thirty years, however, the urbanisation has not been paid the attention it should have been. Things really started to come to a head around six years ago when the town hall said that improvements to pavements, roads, drainage and street lighting would be undertaken but with the aid of money raised through a special charge on residents.

This charge, naturally enough, didn't sit well with property owners who had seen the urbanisation deteriorate because of apparent town hall neglect. Around this time, therefore, these owners started to exert their muscle. And one of the most vocal was Dr. Garry Bonsall, the founder and first president of the Gotmar Residents' Association.

Garry, who is no longer a permanent resident in Gotmar, is someone I know quite well. He was a thorough pain in the town hall's backside, especially that of the by then mayor Joan Cerdà. Pressure from the residents' association began to bear some fruit. The mayor conceded that there should be an architect's plan for Gotmar's rehabilitation but insisted that there wasn't the finance to effect it. The residents' association disagreed. It was the town hall's obligation.

The influence of this association cannot be underestimated. There had been a previous association but it was all but moribund. It was reconstituted and became a powerful voice, and one of those who helped it to become so was, surprisingly one might think, the current mayor Tomeu Cifre. It was he who suggested that the association should be the means of communication with the town hall and the means therefore of channelling complaints.

Residents' associations can, if set up properly, be influential, and so it proved with the Gotmar association. Now, some years after it began to take on and challenge the town hall, the urbanisation is to get the improvements that had been demanded years ago.

It should not be forgotten in all of this that it was Cifre who was instrumental in getting the association back up and running. It is he who has now approved financing of over one million euros; the special charge is not to be applied. There is perhaps an irony regarding Cifre's involvement. Regularly criticised for acting in a less than fully participatory fashion and in a less than accountable manner, the suggestion he made about the association was one in which participation and accountability were inherent.

On becoming mayor, there had been the prospect of Cifre meeting regularly with a sort of confederation of different residents' associations in Pollensa. This appears not to have happened, but this may not be because the mayor found he had other things to do but because of the associations themselves.

Recently, the role of residents' associations was spoken about in a wider context than just Pollensa, so across the Balearics. They have a role to play for several reasons. One is that they are a genuine form of citizen participation. Two is that town halls are obliged to listen to them. Three is that they give non-Spanish residents a place in local democracy which they might not otherwise take, or take particularly seriously. Though non-Spaniards can vote in local elections, rare are those who become actively involved in local politics. As groups - and they can comprise considerable numbers of voters - they can influence or threaten to influence the outcome of elections, so they do have to be listened to, but only if they are organised properly and act with common purpose. One suspects that this doesn't always happen.

As with any group, there is the potential for factions to form and for there to be separate agendas. The Gotmar association, when Garry was president, was evidence of how to try and avoid this. Efforts were made, which included bringing in a trainer, to get people to work towards specific objectives and a common purpose, thus overcoming differences which might stem from cultural differences or simply different agendas. But, and in Mallorca it is especially the case, the differences can arise for reasons unrelated to issues which residents might face. They can include the power of individual friendships linked to political parties which undermine a common purpose - the pervasiveness, therefore, of amiguismo and of self-interests.

Then there is the potential for one association to dominate a confederation. In Pollensa, the residents association in Puerto Pollensa is powerful insofar as it operates as a commercial entity. It runs the beach, for example. And it hasn't been immune from accusations of a rather cosy relationship with the town hall. If it operates to its own agenda, then why should it be that interested in what other associations want?

In Gotmar at least the association does seem to have got what it wanted, though whether this is as a result of some political expediency - local elections looming - is hard to say.