The Minister of Public Works, Transport and Housing of the Canary Islands Government, Sebastián Franquis, has reached an agreement with the public works ministers of the seven island councils to update the modules of the conservation and maintenance costs of the roads of regional interest that have been put into service and transferred to the island administrations between 2015 and 2022.
In this way, the minister fulfils the commitment he made with the Federation of Island Councils (FECAI) at the beginning of the Legislature and updates by 10.1 million euros the funding that is distributed annually among the councils to finance the maintenance of the network of roads of regional interest of each island, something that has not been done since 2015, details the Ministry in a statement.
“We have reached an agreement between the Government and the seven cabildos according to what was committed to with the FECAI at the beginning of the Legislature, which was to update the costs of the modules of maintenance and conservation of the roads of regional interest in our Autonomous Community,” said Sebastián Franquis.
The minister thanked the local councils for the “sensitivity they have shown in reaching this agreement, which is important and which is also historic, because the costs of the road maintenance modules had not been updated in the Canary Islands since 2015, and this is what has been achieved today”.
This, he said, “is going to mean an amount of around 10 million euros, which is going to be distributed among the different island councils on whose islands the kilometres of the regional road network have increased in recent years”.
The island councils are the administrations in charge of the upkeep of roads of regional interest which are carried out by the Regional Government’s Department of Public Works, Transport and Housing once they have been completed and put into service.
Decree 112/2002 on the transfer of functions from the Autonomous Community to the regional councils states that, when the Government opens new roads to traffic, the maintenance of these roads is transferred to the corresponding regional councils, and indicates that “the economic modules will be determined or updated on an annual or multi-annual basis by the General Budget Law of the Autonomous Community, following a report-proposal by the corresponding Sectoral Conference”.
However, the update provided for in the decree had not been carried out since 2015, so the funding did not take into account the number of new kilometres of the road network of regional interest put into service in the last eight years.
Between 2015 and 2022, a total of 91.2 kilometres of roads and tunnels on various islands were handed over to the cabildos by the regional administration.
Therefore, with the agreement closed this Friday, the Government of the Canary Islands fulfils the commitment agreed with the FECAI in July 2021 to pay the costs of maintenance and conservation of the stretches of roads transferred and put into operation from 1 January 2015 to 2022.
CANARY ISLANDS: MORE THAN 91 KILOMETRES OF NEW ROADS SINCE 2015
“It should be noted that it has been an agreement on which we have all agreed, in which an important consensus has been reached between the Government and the cabildos in order to fulfil the commitment made with the FECAI to definitively close this conflict that existed with the maintenance of the roads, since their updating had been pending since 2015”, said the councillor Franquis.
In the last eight years, 91.2 kilometres of new roads have been completed and put into service on these four islands, distributed as follows.
In Fuerteventura, 33.9 kilometres of new dual carriageway roads were put into service (Caldereta-Corralejo and Costa Calma-Pecenescal); in Tenerife, 26.8 kilometres of roads, including 2.3 kilometres of tunnels (Erques-Santiago del Teide and Adeje-Erques); in Gran Canaria, 24.9 kilometres of road, including 6.3 kilometres of tunnels (first phase of the Carretera de La Aldea and IV phase of the Circunvalación) and in Lanzarote, 5.6 kilometres of dual carriageway (widening of the Arrecife ring road).
Maintenance payments to the local councils are based on the cost of modules which are applied to each kilometre of road depending on its size and complexity, which can be a module for dual carriageway, single carriageway or tunnel.
