Let’s avoid the sweats associated with bad news. We already have enough with the Egyptian summer we have to endure. Let’s refresh ourselves with an article of measured complacency with the Govern. Watch out, not to be confused with enthusiasm! Experience prescribes always taking the pill of skepticism when a ruler makes an announcement, whether they are from Tyre or Troy.
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Salvador Illa and his first squire, Conseller Albert Dalmau, predicted on Monday a true revolution in the form of a draft bill. See, if not: reducing to one month the time needed for processing some building permits, from six to eight months the validation of urban planning, and also speeding up industrial projects. Let’s skip the details. It is enough to add that to make it possible, a long list of existing laws and the respective regulations that develop them must be modified.
The president is right in the diagnosis and also in the remedy. There is no housing, industrial, or any kind of policy that can come out unscathed from the perfect administrative web that any attempt to erect or rehabilitate a building has become. Not to mention freeing land or readjusting its use for another purpose. An invitation to give up in the worst case. In the best case, indefinite and unjustifiable delays that economically increase any initiative, both for developers and citizens.
This is not a Catalan problem. These beans are cooked everywhere. Spain and Europe also live in a kind of administrative arrest. It is no coincidence that one of the pillars of the new policy promoted by the European Commission is deregulation. It has been necessary for the continent to show clear signs of suffocation for politics to decide to loosen the noose around its neck. We will see if it is true that it is never too late if the outcome is good.
Let’s return to Illa and Dalmau. On Monday, the president slipped in the presentation of his streamlining project a positively quixotic speech: “…it is my trade and exercise to go around the world righting wrongs and undoing grievances.” Only that he is not facing windmills, but real giants that have grown and become strong under the sickly zeal of the Administration itself and the overregulation served by politics. Decades of adding rules to rules, regulations to regulations, visas to visas, reports to reports, and obstacles to obstacles.
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Skepticism does not arise from distrust towards the will expressed by the President of the Generalitat, but from the very difficulty of the challenge he has decided to face. His enemies in this endeavor are not outside the Administration, but spread throughout it. From the State to the municipality, passing through the autonomous Administration itself. And also in some sectoral areas of the private sector that have made administrative suffocation a lucrative business.
Salvador Illa will have to step on many toes to achieve his goal. The resistances of misunderstood municipalism, for example. But also to turn around an almost hegemonic corporate culture in the Administration that consists of seeing the citizen as a suspect who deserves neither credit nor trust. That change of mentality is the one that seems most complicated. The Govern will need an extra dose of resistance and strength when the saboteurs organize. It is not easy to win a battle that so many have lost before.
I have made the same joke several times to Conseller Dalmau about his commitment to the reform of the Administration, another of the great promises of the socialist Govern. Disguised as a bird of ill omen, I tell him that the Administration is actually unreformable, since those who must apply the changes, the civil servants themselves, resist it tooth and nail. The same can be said of any attempt to speed up and simplify deadlines and requirements.
Since all this is actually essential, nothing would please us more than to be wrong and for the Govern to succeed, even if only in part. The optimism in which Illa and Dalmau engage deserves the same encouragement that a marathon runner receives at the start of the race. We initially celebrate that the president has urged the Administration to trust the citizen instead of clipping their wings by exhausting them with demands. Speeches are not enough but they matter. We will judge the results. But today applause is due. And for one day, without reservations.
