Residents will mobilize in response to Cort's "lack of transparency" regarding the felling of the beautiful shade trees: "We will not stop"

Residents of Palma and the citizens' platform in defense of the beautiful shade trees will continue their protests to demand accountability from the Palma City Council (Cort) for the felling of 17 trees in Plaça de Llorenç Villalonga. "We will not stop," affirmed Nina, a member of the Canamunt Neighborhood Association. They also announced plans for further actions to denounce "the unnecessary mass felling, the refusal to take a less drastic approach, the lack of transparency, the absence of citizen participation, and the speed with which the felling was carried out," among other things, explained the president of the La Calatrava Neighborhood Association. The residents requested an urgent meeting with the mayor of Palma, Jaime Martinez, to initiate a dialogue and halt any similar actions to those taken in Plaça de Llorenç Villalonga. Citizens are accusing the City Council of violating the Organic Regulations for Citizen Participation by failing to provide them with reports detailing the poor condition of the trees and by rejecting the alternative proposals they submitted to the council to avoid removing the trees. The coordinators of the initiatives have not specified the nature of the activities because, they believe, "the element of surprise is very important." With these demands, the citizens intend to ask the City Council a series of questions that challenge and question its actions. "Were 17 diseased trees planted in a year and a half? Why, if the trees posed such a high risk of falling, wasn't the plaza closed to traffic during the massive festival for the town's patron saint or during the wine fair held in the Parque del Mar?" Navarro asked.

The president of the Palma Federation of Neighborhood Associations, Maribel Alcázar, has elaborated on this request for compliance with the regulations, so that residents "have the right to be considered an affected party" and are informed "with sufficient time." Furthermore, she criticized the fact that the reports the City Council uses for tree removal "are conspicuously absent" and that it hides behind the assessments of municipal technicians without allowing for verification. "If a technocracy governs, what is the purpose of politics?" she asked again.

Among her proposals, Navarro announced that they will demand the municipal corporation replace the beautiful shade trees to transform the space into an "urban forest" and rejected the idea of ​​turning it into a "garden plaza" or "filling it with terraces." For his part, the president of Friends of the Earth, Mariano Reaño, maintained that if the Palma City Council had closed the area "as it should have," the judge's decision regarding the removal of the trees "would have been different." The spokesperson for GOB, Margalida Ramis, indicated that some members of the platform are arboriculture technicians and that they are already working on a "counter-report" to respond to the City Council's report—which she referred to in order to criticize its anonymity. The Platform did not specify what the report that contradicts the City Council's report determines, although Ramis stated that the technicians who prepared it will decide the document's future course of action.