Collboni sets a date for the first political exam of the term

BarcelonaThe mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, already has a date for his first major political exam of the term. The fourth deputy mayor, Jordi Valls, announced this Friday the convening of an extraordinary Economy commission next Tuesday to put to a vote the fiscal ordinances for the next term and the proposal to increase the tourist surcharge on cruise ships that call at the port. Two key debates that the municipal government aspires to be able to move forward before facing a folder that from the outset seems much more complicated: the budgets.

In a press conference, Valls said he is confident in being able to move forward with both the ordinances and the new surcharge—which he is promoting in two separate files—because, he said, both are measures that stem from previous agreements with ERC and the Commons. In the case of municipal taxes, he explained that they will be continuist and that they will maintain the government's philosophy throughout the mandate of increasing tourist taxation and practically freezing the taxes paid by the city's residents.

In this sense, the deputy mayor specified that the 2027 ordinances will include the agreement that Valls himself closed with Barcelona en Comú a year ago: raising the IBI (property tax) on luxury hotels from the current 1.17% to 1.3%, the legal maximum. The law allows the city councils of cities like Barcelona to apply a differentiated IBI rate to the 10% of properties with the highest value in the city, a category in which there are 233 properties, of which 203 are luxury hotels.

In addition to the ordinances, Valls explained that he will also bring to Tuesday's commission the proposal to increase the municipal surcharge on cruise ships that call at the port, which are those that spend less than 12 hours in the city. In the month of June, the PSC, ERC, and Comuns reached an agreement in Parliament that allowed—through an amendment to the accompanying law—for Barcelona to triple the surcharge on cruise ships, going from the maximum of 8 euros per day to 24 euros.

Now the municipal government is landing that agreement with a proposal that plans to increase the surcharge gradually. Thus, the forecast is that in 2027 this surcharge will go from the current 5 euros to 12, and then increase at a rate of four euros each year until reaching 24 euros in 2030. An increase, mind you, that will have to pass a vote in the city council annually. The City Council calculates that if it manages to approve all the increases, by the year 2031 the surcharge on cruise ships in port could leave up to 23.7 million euros more in the municipal coffers. However, Valls has stressed that the goal is not to increase revenue, but to discourage this type of offer.

The support of the 'comuns', up in the air

To move forward with the ordinances and the new tourist surcharge, however, the municipal government will need the votes of other groups. In the case of Barcelona en Comú, the negotiation has started on the wrong foot. This Friday, the group's spokesperson, Marc Serra, asked Collboni to remove the files from the agenda. The reason? They want the surcharge on cruise ships to rise to the maximum as early as 2027 and not gradually as the PSC executive is currently proposing. On Wednesday, the municipal government already rejected another request from the Comuns that involved raising the tourist surcharge for luxury hotels to 8 euros this year.

While waiting to see what position Barcelona en Comú ends up adopting on each of the files, another door has opened for Collboni to move forward with the new surcharge on cruise ships in port. In a statement, the leader of Junts per Barcelona at the City Council, Jordi Martí Galbis, said that his group views the increase "favorably," but has demanded that the extra resources the council receives from this measure "revert into less tax pressure for residents and a shade plan to address the climate crisis."