The new fountain construction in Turre is actually a front for a massive bit of corruption in favour of the councillor for building, alledged the opposition PSOE party today.
You’ll remember that Turre last year had a vote for a new design for their old fuente morisco. That’s the ancient fountain behind the community centre, on the bit of scrubland blocked off with some metal sidings. If, when walking down the main avenue, just below the new heladeria, you have ever fallen into a dry water channel, that’s the old runoff that took the water down to the fields by the river.
Years ago, when it all fell apart, they cut the water off there and rerouted it to the current fountain in front of the townhall.
Last week, the county council came up with the funds for the new fountain, which will extent the main square of Turre and change the location of the fountain back to its traditional place.
So far, so good. Here’s the corruption.
It seems that the councillor in question (who’s also in charge of the project, ah-hem) owns a “vital” (according to the townhall, but not to the PSOE) bit of land next to the fuente morisco.
In exchange for donating this little bit of land, he gets, not just the urbanisation of a large plot of land he owns in La Finca, but also has several bits of land he owns at the bottom of the main avenue declared urbanisable, without going through all the messy process of submitting paperwork, etc.
The PSOE also say that the final design for the fountain was modified after public approval to avoid any damage to the garden of the councillors house, to the detriment of his neighbour.
He also gets 300,000€ cash if the townhall decides not to go ahead with the project.
The PSOE say that this man has made “the deal of his life, similar to winning the lottery” with this deal, and that’s not only completely out of proportion, but probably illegal. I assume they speak from experience – there’s a few skeletons in the cupboard from the time they were running the town.
They also complain that they knew nothing of all this until the vote last Friday.
The trouble is that since the rehabilitation of the fuente morisco has been declared “in the public interest” it has been rushed through, and was voted on last week in the council. The opposition say that they are all in favour of the fuente, but not on this “back handed dirty little bit of business”.