The Government of the Generalitat has finally given in to the requests of the town councils and completed a decree-law that will allow public and private swimming pools to be filled and filled as long as they are open to the general public. The formula to be able to adopt this measure is to consider the swimming pools of sports clubs, neighborhood communities and hotels and campsites as "climate shelter" against heat waves. The opening will also have to be compensated by saving water consumption, for example from showers.
The decree law, which will be approved on Tuesday at the Government meeting and which will have to go through Parliament, which will ratify it in the permanent deputation on Friday, April 19, before which councilor David Mascort will appear, was advanced yesterday by El Periódico de Catalunya and confirmed by sources from the Department of Climate Action.
The new regulations are the result of the negotiations that the Generalitat has held over the last few weeks with the local world, represented by the two municipal organizations, the Federation of Municipalities of Catalonia (FMC) and the Catalan Association of Municipalities (AMC). which have led the demands of the town councils. In fact, this regulation should already have been included in the law accompanying the budgets of the Generalitat, but this was prevented by the non-approval of the accounts for this year, which at the same time triggered the call for early elections by to May 12.
The Government has emphasized that the new decree is the result of dialogue and the desire for consensus with the municipalities to provide them with more tools against the drought. It will be the municipalities that will decide which swimming pools they consider as climate shelters. Both public and private companies can enter this category. In the case of the latter, their owners will have to reach agreements with the respective councils to define their uses.
The swimming pools that obtain the consideration of climate shelter can be filled with the essential quantities to guarantee the quality of the water from a sanitary point of view and to save water in other ways. The regulations will make it clear that if a pool is not registered as a climate shelter, it cannot be filled or refilled under any circumstances.
On the other hand, the decree-law will open the possibility of limiting the consumption made by tourists in those municipalities that, for three consecutive months, exceed the established maximum expenditure levels. In this case the town councils will have to oblige the tourist accommodation in the municipality to comply with the general restrictions, that is to say, a maximum of 115 liters per person per day in an exceptional situation, 100 liters in an emergency situation, 90 in an emergency 2 and 80 liters per person per day upon arrival in the emergency phase 3.
The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, has welcomed the Generalitat's change of heart, although he hopes to "find out the fine print of the decree to know what its scope is and what resources they allocate to apply these extraordinary measures". "Making decrees is free, but the consequences of these decrees are not. And it can't be that we always pay the councils", he warned.
For its part, the Hotel Association of Barcelona published a statement in which it values "very positively" that hotels have been taken into consideration "as a possible solution and alternative to combat the high summer temperatures and can become possible climate shelters".
