The mayor of La Línea de la Concepción (Cádiz), Juan Franco, has clarified that the claim to become an Autonomous City “is not a matter of feelings, because we feel we are from Cádiz, Andalusia and Spaniards”, but rather a “solution administrative legal problems “that the city has,” which has no comparison with any municipality in the national territory.
In an interview with Canal Sur Radio, Franco explained that “it is simply” a matter of “equipping” La Línea “with institutions that allow it to face a unique situation throughout the national territory.”
Franco cites problems such as workers in Gibraltar or drug trafficking
Thus, he recalled that there are currently 11,000 people in La Línea, one in six, who are working in Gibraltar and are contributing to a foreign pension fund, “with the consequences that this has”, in addition to encountering “very serious problems associated with to drug trafficking or the effects of Brexit that are being noticed from the first day after the referendum. “
It is, according to the mayor, “a series of added problems that we understand cannot be solved by the legal structure that we have right now.” “We would need a special tax regime, specific care for these people, a differentiated treatment for officials who are working in the municipality. We are not proposing a ‘procés’ or a unilateral declaration of independence, as is obvious,” added Juan Franco .
General view of the full linense.
The mayor has stressed that what is being requested authorization to see what the citizens think. “We may find that it may seem like a great idea to us but that later it is not supported by the bulk of the population,” he said.
Juan Franco has indicated, by way of example, that Ceuta “has a budget of 290 million euros, it is true that it assumes powers that the city council does not assume, but the City Council of La Línea has a budget of 48 million”. In the same way, he pointed out that “San Roque, to put the only neighboring municipality that La Línea has, has a per capita budget of 2,350 euros and in the case of La Línea it is 760 euros per inhabitant”.
“That they tell me a municipality in Spain that has 11,000 people who every day go to work in a foreign country and that does not have a different attention, or that it has the drug trafficking problems that this city has or with teaching staff that has a rotation of up to 70% per year, with the quality with which this education is finished, “said the mayor, who has stressed that” these are issues that have no parallel with any other territory, it is not a sentimental issue, it is a administrative legal solution to the problems we have “.
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