To add insult to injury, almost, the badly battered business along Velilla in front of the car park works have received yet another blow: they will have to close for a month or more so that the sidewalk paving can be complete. What a slap in the face!
The Partido Popular puts this down to poor planning, teetering upon total improvisation without any foresight. Whatever the case, nothing changes the fact that this project that should have lasted nine months, has already lasted two years, and now it seems is going to eat into the beginning of summer, as well!
When I asked the Mayor during the last interview with him in April about the rumour that businesses would lose their terraces and access between then and summer, he answered that he had no knowledge of this. Well, a rumour it wasn’t and how is it that the top decision maker in town didn’t know about this fatal decision?
The PP went on to ask why more warning wasn’t given, as it would have given businesses there time to organise themselves, whereas the 48-hour notice was not only inadequate, but a cruel joke.
Danny’s Bar, as many of you already know, lost the steps up to the entrance of his bar, leaving him to improvise a make-shift alternative. Yet now he and many others have been told that they must close.
Just how is anybody supposed to survive round here?
The first car-park project (Paseo del Altillo) was a complete disaster with set back after set back with businesses going down the drain, not to mention the traffic disruption. Yet, despite the well-demonstrated problems that such projects cause, a licence was given for another car park to begin in Avenida Don Juan Carlos. Again, despite promises of it all being over in nine months, it too staggered on a couple of years. And again, circulation during the work was chaotic and any impartial observer could only come to the conclusion that this main thoroughfare was cut off to the public, more for the convenience of the Hotel Bahía II, whose construction coincided with the car-park work, than for the car-park project itself.
Undeterred by two previous instances of underground car-park construction in the town turning into chaos and dragging on two or three times longer than projected, permission was given to commence two – not one but two, car-park projects, simultaneously! Result? Bloody disaster yet again! You can be forgiven for believing that a team of bureaucrats and politicians won a competition on how to run a township in the most disastrous manner possible and the winners got Almuñécar to demonstrate how.
So why is the Town Hall insisting on burying parking space (not to mention destroying all previously free parking areas)? Why not build multi-storey ones? Why, as was the case of the Altillo, were 120 free parking places lost to provide 403 underground? How many surface parking spaces have disappeared to make room for the bunker parking? Subtract what you lose from what you gain and you will see that the actual parking is much less than proclaimed. Add to that many are private parking spaces and therefore not available to our tourists and what are you left with?