The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Fernando Sánchez (Europa Press)
The Community of Madrid, chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has entered the water war and is willing to go to the Constitutional Court if necessary to defend its interests against the state decree that regulates the use of the Tagus River.
This is reflected in a contract tendered by Canal de Isabel II, and won by the Ramón y Cajal law firm, to study and, where appropriate, litigate, nine aspects of the regulation that open a new front against the Government presided over by Pedro Sánchez.
Díaz Ayuso herself already warned in May 2022: "The Tagus hydrological plan wants to reduce Madrid's water."
In this way, the capital region joins a struggle in which the regions of Castilla-La Mancha (where the water is collected), Andalusia, the Valencian Community and Murcia (where it is received,
and that they have also announced their appeal to the Supreme Court).
And not only that.
In full sprint towards the municipal and regional elections on May 28, the Government of Díaz Ayuso finds another reason to confront that of Sánchez, with whom it has already collided in health, fiscal, economic or international matters.
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The core of the conflict is in the Valmayor reservoir, which, with a capacity of 124.4 cubic hectometres, is the second largest in the Community of Madrid.
1.7 million Madrid residents depend on it to drink, 25% of the population, according to the regional government.
And the new regulation conditions prior authorization from the State that the reservoir can receive water from the Alberche river, through the San Juan-Valmayor transfer.
"This has not happened in any autonomous community," Ayuso complained almost a year ago.
"Never, within the same concession, has this prior authorization been requested."
But it is not the only point of contention, according to Madrid, which will invest, to begin with, 35,000 euros to prepare for a legal battle that it calculates will last at least four years.
Thus, according to the documentation consulted by this newspaper, Canal de Isabel II understands that its interests are affected with regard to "maintenance of the principle of supremacy in the use of water to supply populations at all times and especially in situations of drought or scarcity”;
the "establishment of an authorization prior to carrying out a transfer between reservoirs of different exploitation systems of the Demarcation";
“of a regime of ecological flows in water masses”;
the “impossibility of establishing ecological flows at the Las Nieves and Pozo de los Ramos dams due to lack of regulation capacity”;
or the "absence of justification of the established generating flows";
the “lack of definition of the parameters and quality conditions of the ecological flows that are defined”.
Aerial view of the Tajo-Segura transfer channel in the town of Almonacid de Zorita, in Guadalajara.PACO PUENTES
"The Canal does not have its own legal services," explains a government spokesman.
"That is why an office has been hired, because as we have been saying for a long time, we are not in favor of the Tagus Hydrological Plan, since it harms the people of Madrid by reducing the water for the Valmayor reservoir," he adds.
"The royal decree, and all its edges, will be studied in depth to see how to proceed."
The agreement details that Madrid is willing to expedite all its options: "The actions to be carried out in the legal defense of Canal de Isabel II will consist of the study of the documentation, preparation of reports, (...) preparation and decision of the strategy of defense (...) and, in general, other judicial or extrajudicial actions that are appropriate by law in all instances, including the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court, and until a final judgment is handed down in the procedure or procedures that are necessary or mandatory to process to comply with the object of the contract”.
Strategy in the courts
That the Community of Madrid is willing to go as far as the Constitutional Court only deepens the strategy implemented by its Government since Díaz Ayuso came to power, in August 2019. In the almost four years that have elapsed since then, the Madrid Executive has gone to court against 12 State decisions of all kinds: from the management of the pandemic, to educational curricula, through fiscal policy.
And now comes the turn of the water.
What is the origin of the conflict?
The Government of Spain approved on January 24 the hydrological planning of the 12 river basins that are within its competence to extend through several autonomous communities.
For the first time, the Ministry for Ecological Transition set an ecological flow for the Tagus River, as required by five Supreme Court rulings, European regulations and the Water Law for 22 years.
But establishing that flow —a minimum of water that must circulate— has consequences beyond the basin, in Alicante, Murcia and Almería.
Because this flow will reduce the amount of water that is transferred from the headwaters of the Tagus to the Mediterranean and used for domestic consumption, but mainly to irrigate crops.
Since then, the most important control point has been in the Community of Madrid, specifically in Aranjuez, where a minimum flow will be progressively established: by 2023 it should be 7 cubic meters per second, in 2026 it will rise to 8 cubic meters and in 2027, to 8.6.
Control center of Canal de Isabel II.
As a consequence, government sources then estimated that the transfer to the Mediterranean could be reduced by a range of 70 to 110 cubic hectometres per year in the worst-case scenario (the average annual transfer is around 320 cubic hectometres).
But, to make up for this drop, the ministry is committed to desalinated water.
Faced with this design of the transfer, the governments of Andalusia (PP), Murcia (PP) and the Valencian Community (PSOE, Podemos and Compromìs) have not only supported the mobilizations in the countryside to denounce the thousands of jobs that will be destroyed, according to their calculations .
They have also announced their intention to go to the Supreme Court.
And now they have a new company in that judicial strategy: the Community of Madrid.
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