Maintenance Failure: Albufera

The Supreme Court in Madrid last week ruled against the Balearic Government in a compensation claim, the origins of which go back 26 years. In 1988 the Albufera wetlands were granted protection from any further development when they were declared a nature park. The regional government is thus liable for paying 21 million euros to a developer - Playas de Mallorca S.A. - in respect of some 33 hectares of land (approximately 80 acres) on which it has not been able to build villas or hotels.

The time that it has taken for the court to reach its decision is extraordinary. Ten years ago the Balearic High Court had ruled that the government was not liable, a previous decision having said that it was. The level of compensation then was 13.5 million, so over the intervening years the amount has risen by more than 50%.

Playas de Mallorca S.A. was one of the companies responsible for the transformation of Albufera into Alcúdia's City of Lakes in the 1960s and 1970s. That transformation project originally envisaged far greater development than that which occurred, but there were pockets of further development which were placed in the pipeline. The 33 hectares would have represented development of roughly a quarter of the size of what became the City of Lakes, but with protected status came prohibition and ultimately compensation.

Protection, welcome though it most certainly was, has brought with it questionable benefits. In environmental terms, one can't question the advantage of protection, but in ongoing care, attention, maintenance, management and benign exploitation, one can.

Albufera is currently experiencing a problem of a natural variety: a lack of water. The situation this autumn is much the same as it was last year. Too little rain has meant that water levels have dropped and, as a consequence, migratory aquatic birds are seeking alternative locations. The situation will doubtless right itself, but in the meantime there are fewer birds than would normally be expected and so reduced opportunities for bird watchers. Despite this, it is said that visitor numbers are "optimal", which is a vague description but not an unsurprisingly vague one. How do they know how many visitors there are?

At present, cutbacks have meant that it is not possible to conduct satisfactory censuses of the number of birds at given times in Albufera. If they can't count the wildlife, how can they count the human life? And even if they can arrive at an "optimal" number, how many of these visitors are not residents and especially not members of the regular school parties which descend on Albufera?

Keeping tabs on the number of visitors and who they are has not been helped by the fact that the Can Bateman information centre has been closed for most of the year. It has now re-opened, but its closure is symptomatic of the malaise which affects natural spaces such as Albufera. These are granted protected status or, as was the case with Son Real near Can Picafort, acquired at vast cost and are then, thanks to unclear lines of responsibility as well as lack of funding, allowed to fall into neglect.

Moreover, personnel, when there are any, receive insufficient training in the use of the information systems at Can Bateman, while there have been previous occasions when the centre has been closed and when visitors were unable to use the so-called green card (now abandoned) to obtain discounts for bike hire or indeed obtain a bike, full stop. These all point to a failure, in marketing terms, of ensuring that the product is right. But this is a marketing and product failure mirrored elsewhere in, for example, the absence of a dedicated website for Albufera (there is good information through Balears Natura, but this isn't only for Albufera) or in other information centres being shut; the one in Puerto Pollensa's La Gola rarely seems to be open.

Pollensa's tourism development plan includes a focus on attracting bird-watching tourists and so, in addition to the La Gola centre, the town hall would like the old fish market to include another information centre for the Tramuntana and its birds, wildlife and what have you. Laudable though this might be, has any consideration been given to its ongoing maintenance and funding? And who would supply these? The town hall, the Council of Mallorca, the government?

Local authorities talk the talk about wildlife and nature tourism but then do too little to back it up. They create centres and then don't look after them. They have natural spaces but then equally fail to care for them adequately. Maybe the developer should have been allowed to build, but then, had there been more City of Lakes-style development, who would have looked after it? Alcúdia's City of Lakes suffers from seemingly being a low priority. It's a familiar tale. Create something and then don't maintain it.

Let's Spend Lots Of Money (Me Too)

300 million euros, over 650 different buildings and facilities for sporting, cultural and administrative purposes. These are the bare facts of what the Council of Mallorca and town halls have been spending money on over the past 15 years. In itself, the spend might seem reasonable enough, if it has all been a case of creating necessary infrastructure, but more often than not, this has not been the case. It has been spend predicated on a me-too mentality, spread across municipalities whose sizes rarely justify the spend. It has been spend that hasn't always been spent, as suppliers have not been paid, and spend that has demanded ever more spend, in the form of maintenance; a spend that cannot be made because there isn't the money for it.

Revelations as to the startling levels of expenditure by local authorities in Mallorca have slowly been filtering out. First we learned, two years ago, that personnel costs at town halls had doubled in the space of ten years. Then we learned, last month, that a quarter of total town hall spend is devoted to "competences" that are beyond those which town halls are obliged to spend money on. Now we have the latest facts - the 300 million euros on public swimming-pools, cultural centres, football pitches, buildings for administration and so on and so on.

The swimming-pools are an interesting one. In the north of Mallorca, Sa Pobla leaks a deficit of 150,000 euros a year for maintaining what was the first indoor pool in the area. This pool was followed by the construction of pools in Santa Margalida, Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa; four pools for a total combined population of under 60,000. Maybe this is the right ratio, I really couldn't say, but what I can say is that each pool has been a disaster. Santa Margalida's faces demolition because its leak simply cannot be rectified. Alcúdia's and Puerto Pollensa's have both been beset with problems related to the contractors operating the pools. They all lose money.

The pools have been symptomatic of an absence of planning as to how to run the facilities once they were built and of the presence of an attitude which demands that because one town has something, so must its neighbour. On an island with so many small towns, it has led to a wholly unnecessary proliferation of all manner of facilities and had it not been for economic crisis, there would be more being developed.

A fine example of this me-too mentality was Pollensa's desire for an auditorium. It would have required an investment in the region of ten or eleven million euros. The town hall finally saw sense earlier this year and scrapped the project, one that was always flawed, as there already was an auditorium in Alcúdia, one that has never operated at anything like full capacity since it was built at the end of the last century.

There are other examples. Take the industrial estate in Alcúdia. Blocked off to prevent vehicle access and so hopefully stop more copper cabling being nicked, its layout was finished three years ago. There is still not a single unit on it, the reason for which, supposedly, is an inability to arrive at an agreement over electricity supply. If this really is the reason, why was something so fundamental not sorted out much earlier on? One fancies there are other reasons, and one only has to look at the empty spaces on industrial estates in neighbouring towns to know what they might be.

Less extravagant are the day-to-day expenditures for facilities like kindergartens and day centres, yet these expenditures cannot be met, mainly because the regional government doesn't give sufficient funding. But in a way, this sums up the whole issue of how infrastructure and facilities came into being. Town halls expected the flow of cash from regional government to continue, the regional government expected the flow of cash from national government to continue, and national government was probably still under the impression that Brussels would be handing over blank cheques.

There is much to be said for towns and villages all having different types of facility, as they add to a sense of community and of identity, but - and this raises once more questions as to the viability of the continuing existence of town halls in their current state - this has come at a high price, one paid for through a system of local government that was allowed to grow like topsy without sufficient or any thought being given to where this system was leading. We now know where it has led.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Demands made for recuperation of Puerto Pollensa public areas

The Alternativa Party has set out demands for the recovery by Pollensa town hall of parts of the Gotmar urbanisation and other areas of Puerto Pollensa, e.g. one in Singala that belongs to the town. In Gotmar, the Alternativa highlights the extent to which pavements and also steps have become overgrown and, in one case, the Calle Estornell, the extent to which it has all but disappeared as well as having an electricity transformer in the middle of it.