The President of the Government of Navarra, María Chivite, during her speech this Saturday at the institutional act of Foral Police Day on February 25 in Pamplona. Villar López (EFE)
Navarra will assume exclusive control of traffic on all its roads from July 1, as announced this Thursday by the president of the community, the socialist María Chivite.
For a maximum period of five years, the Foral Police and the Civil Guard will continue to jointly monitor the roads.
Thus closes a long chapter in the history of transfers from the central State to the community, which began to be discussed in the time of José María Aznar.
It is the third competence transferred during this legislature to the foral community, after those of Prison Security and the Minimum Vital Income.
The assumption of this new competence implies that the Foral Police ends up being the only body that patrols and attends the Navarrese roads.
In addition, the Provincial Administration will manage complaints for infractions, whether filed by agents or automatic systems, and the final actions that are decided, such as fines or the deduction of points.
It will also assume the management, control and inspection of road awareness and re-education courses that drivers have to take as a result of the loss of points on the license.
Likewise, it will control driving schools and driver recognition centers and plan and execute information campaigns in driver education and training.
Other more specific details of the transfer will be communicated next Tuesday, March 14, at the Transfer Board between Navarra and Spain, of which both the regional Executive and the regional parliamentary groups are part, and in which the agreement will be formalized.
In any case, the transfer will not be immediate, but progressive.
There will be a period —less than five years— during which the Provincial Police and the Civil Guard will continue to jointly carry out road traffic control tasks.
Then, the autonomous body will assume them exclusively, as is already the case with the Ertzaintza in the Basque Country and the Mossos d'Esquadra in Catalonia.
The question of Navarra having exclusive powers in the field of Traffic and Road Safety dates back to the year 2000, after the general elections in March, when the acting President of the Government, José María Aznar, committed to the transfer in the 2000 period -2001 with the highest regional leader, Miguel Sanz, from UPN, but the agreement did not materialize.
Nine years later, in 2009, UPN asked for it again in the Senate, also without success.
We had to wait until October 31, 2018, when the then Navarrese president Uxue Barkos (Geroa Bai) and the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, agreed to definitively undertake the transfer and set a date: May 2019, but they also did not know achievement.
The regional elections of that year brought the socialist María Chivite to power and the new Executive and La Moncloa set up a negotiating commission that, for technical reasons, have been delaying the agreement, until in November, in full conversations for the Budget agreement Generals of the State, the Government and EH Bildu agreed on the date of March 31 as the deadline for the transfer.
Controversy over the transfer
The exclusive assumption of powers by the Provincial Police has been the aspect of the transfer that has caused the most controversy in recent months.
Despite the fact that power has historically been demanded by all the groups that have governed Navarra since Miguel Sanz (UPN), the right has asserted on many occasions that the objective of the current regional government is to expel the Civil Guard from the Community .
The president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, described the agreement between the Government and EH Bildu as "payment to the heirs of ETA", despite the fact that the PP has been contemplating the same measure for Galicia for years, where it governs with an absolute majority.
Feijóo supported the transfer of traffic powers to Galicia in 2008, a measure that did not go ahead despite the support of the PP and Galician socialists and nationalists, but was later stopped in Congress by the PSOE.
Now, the Galician PP maintains an initiative to resume the transfer is blocked after receiving criticism from an association of civil guards.
In the case of Navarra, the measure has received the rejection of the UPN defector deputy Carlos García Adanero, who in the next elections will present himself as a candidate for mayor of Pamplona under the acronym of the PP, and who qualified in Congress that the transfer "It is an insult to the Civil Guard."
In his criticism, Adanero omitted the fact that when the transfer between Aznar and Sanz was first approved, he was already a UPN parliamentarian.
In addition, recently elected as secretary general of his then party, UPN senator María Caballero presented a motion in the Upper House to demand that the transfer be formalized.
The measure does not imply, as has been suggested from the ranks of the right, the expulsion of the Civil Guard of Navarra, where 1,581 guards currently work, of which only 150 are assigned to the traffic service.
From now on, they will be able to choose to request a new destination within the Traffic Group, be relocated to other services of the force in Navarra or join the Foral Police, as regional officials, through a "catwalk" that will be activated by the Board of Transfers.
The regional Executive calculates that it will need 149 more troops in the Navarrese police force to cover the work of surveillance and traffic control, which will be added to the 227 regional agents who are dedicated to this work, out of a total of 1,107 regional police officers.
The transfer agreement contemplates that,
The members of the Civil Guard will continue to be distributed in the fifty barracks in Navarra, dedicated, as up to now, to public security functions, especially in rural areas, mountain rescue, nature protection or control work. of weapons.
The news of the transfer date has been received with satisfaction by the groups that make up the Government of Navarra —PSN, Geroa Bai and Podemos—, EH Bildu and Izquierda-Ezkerra.
For its part, UPN has also valued the assumption of the competition, even with criticism from its president, Javier Esparza, who has censured that the announcement was transmitted to the media before parliamentarians.
Esparza has confirmed that the regionalist formation will support the signing of this transfer, which is opposed by PP and Ciudadanos, their partners within the Navarra Suma coalition.
What the three groups do agree on is that it is not necessary to separate the Civil Guard from providing the service.
Along these lines, Esparza asserts,