Garbage and debris accumulate around Joven Futura | The truth

A tour through the old orchard lanes of this area, including Torre Falcón road and Doctor de la Peña street, allows you to find waste of all kinds, starting with household items, such as sofas, mattresses or mirrors, and ending with waste linked rather to professional activities typical of the renovation sector. Thus, the remains of plaster, brick, cement or plastic coexist, under the area's trees, with wooden doors, toilets or potentially dangerous materials such as fractured fiber cement plates. “Even oil drums have been abandoned around here, which have a more complex removal process, since the Environment must intervene,” explains the president of the Neighborhood Association of the urbanization, Chencho Mateos.

“It is also not unusual to come across abundant remains of peat left lying around here by marijuana growers,” explains Miguel, a resident for 25 years of an area where he arrived long before the development of the urbanization. “In the end, most of what is thrown away here comes from surrounding residents, who know that it is a hidden and unguarded place,” says this neighbor, who has the feeling that this problem has gotten worse after the pandemic.

Mateos has a somewhat different perception, who considers that it is a cyclical problem. «They are not specific circumstances; “The garbage accumulates until it is unsustainable and we manage to clean it, something that is not easy because it requires special interventions that are not included in the services of the street cleaning contract.” Thus, once everything is cleared, the garbage wheel spins again, with a pace that accelerates as the small mountains of waste become more visible.

Revitalization of the environment

For Mateos, the definitive solution to this situation involves a revitalization of the environment that is in the pipeline and that, not long ago, seemed ready to start. “Keeping an area abandoned causes it to continue to degrade, something that could be stopped with the implementation of the planned infrastructure,” he adds. You think a lot more before throwing something away when the area is cared for.

The first of these revolutionary projects was the rehabilitation of the old and dilapidated Casa Torre Falcón. The performance on the historic building, seen by everyone who passes through the West Ring Road, was presented in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. The proposal was to recover this emblematic ancestral villa from the 18th century, with the aim of converting it into a cultural and social center for an enclave in need of resources of this type.

In fact, despite being a project initially promoted by the team of the popular José Ballesta, the socialist government allocated it in the 2022 Municipal Budgets with almost half a million euros, with the idea of ​​facing the rest of the planned investment – ​​about 100,000 euros more – with remainders. But then came, among other vicissitudes, the war in Ukraine and the costs of the project increased significantly, in keeping with skyrocketing inflation, with the project exceeding at least 700,000 euros.

As of today, and to questions from THE TRUTH, the current government team has not wanted to confirm if any item has been reserved for the execution of the project in the 2024 Municipal Budgets, the general lines of which were presented last Friday and which will go unfolding in the coming weeks, after its initial approval in the ordinary plenary session this Thursday. Meanwhile, the tower house, covered in graffiti, with its looted grilles and remains of burning around it, continues to deteriorate.

Parked proposal

A similar, if not greater, uncertainty surrounds the construction of the Joven Futura Metropolitan Park, whose future perimeter is currently littered with small mountains of rubble. This is an initiative of neighborhood origin that seems to have run aground after the support received by “all political groups before the 2019 elections,” Mateos emphasizes. However, after those elections, the project was shelved “due to its size and because it was on an archaeological zone, as we were told,” he points out.

Mateos recalls that, after the vote on the frustrated participatory budgets launched by the previous socialist government in 2022, 150,000 euros were allocated to begin geological and geotechnical studies and carry out a small intervention, waiting for a larger amount to undertake in a more decisive way this large green space of 30,000 square meters. However, municipal sources confirm that, for the moment, no order has been made with this item to the Municipal Urban Developer (Urbamusa). Meanwhile, garbage continues calling for garbage.