Last March, the information that this newspaper had access to made headlines and public debate: the apartment purchased by Ayuso’s partner after his tax fraud added an additional controversy, after having carried out works without the authorization of the Madrid City Council. The origin of the news, which involved a civil servant and former councilor of Chamberí, was Conex, a little-known but very useful database for residents, which allows them to consult municipal files.
A few weeks after very relevant information obtained through the evidence present in Conex was revealed, the Madrid City Council closed a large part of the available documents, preventing the download of all its files. The system began to offer a list of dates and procedures, on which it was not possible to obtain more details through this municipal transparency tool.
The service was launched by the City Council in 2020 through its Urban Planning Sector (then in the hands of Ciudadanos), and since then it has been used by professional groups and neighborhood associations to control permits and complaints. Thus, we have learned of the case, for example, of some mattress stores that, in different neighborhoods of Madrid, had violated municipal aesthetic rules by modifying protected facades as they wished.
The censorship of the Conex documents was published in June by El País. Subsequently, the council did not comment on the closure decision or provide any explanation as to why Almeida’s team had limited a database that had been open for four years. So far, no municipal spokesperson has provided Somos Madrid with any explanations about these events.
This tool was often the only way to verify certain information, since the Madrid City Council press office generally refuses to provide data on authorization processes because it never comments on “special cases”, even if they are of public interest.
The closure of the Conex documents makes it difficult to investigate the urban planning procedures authorized by the Madrid City Council, an institution that has also recently denied this type of information through requests on its Transparency Portal, as the newspaper recently saw.
This is not the only case of the disappearance of relevant information from municipal data. Those related to mobility in the capital have also suffered a significant drop, such as those related to traffic jams or the number of passengers at the Municipal Transport Company (EMT).
In this case, it is impossible to know how many travelers use the services of the municipal company each day, since data on their demand is not available. It has also become more difficult to know whether there are more or less traffic jams in Madrid, since statistics on the intensity of traffic jams on the capital’s roads have been removed. It is also not known how many drivers access Madrid Central each day, the opposition parties explain.
Bicimad breakdown
Since October 2022, there has been no data on the Bicimad devices available or the number of subscribers. This disappearance makes it impossible, for example, to externally control the number of users throughout the year or the number of times all registered users use the system, as well as the number of bicycles in circulation each day. The City Council has limited itself to pointing out in previous reports that there is a statistics section on its website, but that the data is not available in a reusable format, which allows them to be processed quickly and take into account the entire historical series. Somos Madrid has asked whether this data could be published again as in the past, without any municipal official having yet addressed these issues.
While the Mobility area reduces these data, its delegate, Borja Carabante, does not fail to highlight different records of the number of passengers transported on a given day or the maximum number of uses of Bicimad on a given day. The absence of other statistics with which to compare their triumphant figures, due to lack of context, makes it difficult to interpret whether the figures they publish are positive or if they are simply an exception in the historical series.
In the past, access to this data allowed local media to tell the people of Madrid how the system works and to detect moments of tension, such as the one experienced in 2021 with an increase in acts of vandalism and a dramatic drop in available bikesThe Almeida government decided to modify the entire Bicimad statistical system after the publication of this information.
No online tree catalog
This summer, the municipal website disappeared without warning A tree pit, a treea map of all the street trees in the city, in operation since 2007. Thanks to it, anyone with an Internet connection could consult the dimensions of each specimen, its species or its estimated age, as well as report incidents or request its replacement, in case it had disappeared.
“Any government that seeks to control its population must destroy or suppress knowledge, because knowledge is power,” said journalist and writer Marta Peirano in X, commenting on the disappearance of this map of Madrid’s trees. A few days ago, when asked about the closure of the website, Vice Mayor Inmaculada Sanz promised to reopen the information on a new municipal page “with much more up-to-date data.” He assured that they were putting the “final touches” on it before making it public.
The use of the page has been very important for citizen and neighborhood movements that have opposed the cuts made by the City Council and the Community of Madrid, many of which have been the subject of great controversy because there are other alternatives that are less harmful to the green heritage of the city.
The closure of information and transparency spaces has been criticized by Más Madrid, a party that believes that “Mayor Almeida is a bit confused and believes that governing with an absolute majority is also synonymous with absolute opacity,” denounces his councilor Miguel Montejo. “The mandate began with the expulsion of the opposition from the Local Heritage Commission and continued with the blackout of information on many open portals and databases, essential to know their management,” he adds, citing other examples of those developed in this article.
Montejo assures that these files “are necessary for people to know the situation, for example, of the trees in their street. This has just been his last exceptional performancedownload the website that listed the trees and opened its counterpart Gallardón in 2007. » And remember that “in the meantime, he has chased the opposition from the commissions for evaluating subsidies in the districts and we have constant problems getting answers to the requests for information to which we are entitled as councilors.” Furthermore, the councilor of Rita Maestre’s party assures that “what is clearer and more transparent every day is that Almeida dedicates himself to other things, such as talking about national politics and acting as a commentator, rather than acting as mayor, listening to “the neighbors.” respond to the needs and problems of their city.
