Barcelona City Council supports airport expansion
Collboni revives the infrastructure advisory committee that had been sidelined since June
BarcelonaThe Barcelona City Council has reopened this Friday the debate on El Prat airport. It has done so with a position of the plenary in favor of the expansion of the infrastructure. The PSC, Junts, PP and Vox have approved a proposal from the popular party that asks that the Catalan capital "lead and commit to carry out the necessary actions to promote the expansion of the airport." The municipal government has also committed to immediately convene the plenary session of the Infrastructure Advisory Committee that the mayor, Jaume Collboni, created at the beginning of his mandate and that, as How the ARA advanced, has been waiting since June for a response to the first report it made on the airport.
As explained by this newspaper, the Infrastructure Advisory Committee – chaired by former councillor Santi Vila and which brings together around twenty experts in various fields – delivered a working document last June which, according to various sources, the municipal government has since then kept in a drawer at the Alch.
This Friday, the leader of the PP, Daniel Sirera, reproached the City Council for keeping the report hidden and asked why it is being hidden. In response to the popular party and its request to make the document public within a month, the first deputy mayor, Laia Bonet, has announced that in the next few days the advisory body will be convened to debate this document before presenting it to the groups.
That document, which the ARA already had access to, contains around twenty premises on which the debate should be addressed. In them, the experts underline "the need to increase the airport's capacity" and confirm that "with the current operational model" this is not possible. They have not yet taken a position on how this expansion should be carried out and are limited to listing the main options on the table. They do consider it "urgent" to carry out the necessary investments to make a new satellite terminal possible, although they admit that "the alternative of strengthening T2 could also be forced for something more than the low cost".
While waiting for the final document that the experts are working on, the proposal approved this Friday by the plenary positioned the council in favour of the expansion and asked it to support "the implementation of the most suitable and viable technical option with the aim of increasing the airport's operational capacity and ensuring its role as a hub international and intercontinental to boost and energize economic activity by generating employment, attracting talent and investment."
During his speech, Bonet argued that Barcelona should have infrastructure that allows it to "play a fundamental role in the global leadership" of Barcelona, and stressed that in this sense the airport is a key point for attracting talent such as "Asia and the Pacific", but stressed that not only the airport must be rethought but also the railway connection with this infrastructure must be improved.
The proposal has also received the support of Junts and Vox. The councillor for the Junts and former regional minister for Territory, Damià Calvet, has defended the favourable vote of his group because it is necessary to improve the airport, but has stressed that there should be no talk of expansion. per se but rather "capacity expansion." He also called for a debate on the airport's governance model.
ERC and the Comuns, on the other hand, have distanced themselves from the measure. BComú councillor Guille López considered it contradictory to defend the airport expansion while saying that the aim is to mitigate the impact of tourism on the city and that the aim is to meet the objective of reaching 2030 as a city with zero emissions. Republican councillor Jordi Coronas, for his part, has questioned Aena's real will and whether what it is pursuing are "speculative interests."