The Motril Town Hall has reissued 14,000 old traffic fines with the hope of filling the municipal coffers… but is it kosher? The municipal opposition parties don’t seem to think so.

So, there you were, sniggering in your bathrooms, believing that the traffic fine that you had incurred four years ago and had heard naught about since, had gone to join the dodos. Wrong!

Yes, because the Town Hall has gone into a frenzy to locate and send out 14,000 such blue-zone or traffic fines, belonging to the period 2010 and 2011.

The PSOE and IU opposition parties have described this action as “ridiculous” and “pure money raking.”

The spokesperson for the IU was positively quivering with indignation, pointing out that the majority of these ‘fine receivers’ are now in very tight economic times; pinched for pennies, so to speak, and the last thing that they need is the Town Hall doing a “Lazarus, come out” number with long-demised traffic fines.

And talking of raising the dead, some of the fines have been sent to people who have died in the intervening years.

José ‘many hats” Garcia Fuente; the man with more job titles than a one-man band in stereo, amongst which is the ‘Vice-Mayor for the Economy’ title, brushed aside all criticism with the statement that although the fines are late arriving, they are still legal and justified.

In acknowledgment that many Motril families are veritably skint, he pointed out that fine holders can pop along to the Town Hall and have the fines ‘fractionized;’ i.e., broken down into multiple smaller quantities.

But there is more, because the Vice Mayor in a fit of “Ho, Ho, Ho, Merry Christmas” has also generously conceded that if the fines are paid before the 20th of May, there will a 10% discount.

Well, it’s hardly a vote-catching idea, is it…

(News: Motril, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)