The Consell de Ibiza plans to approve in a matter of “weeks” an increase in taxi fares of 3.4%, which have not been updated since 2014. The second vice-president, Javier Torres of Ciudadanos, confirms that the processing of the increase will be “relatively fast” because it will not be necessary to pass it through the plenary, but will be approved by the government team in a meeting of the Consell Executiu.
The new insular order of loading and unloading approved on Monday by the Balearic Govern and that comes into force tomorrow, did not included the rate increase proposed by the Consell in the end. However, the new insular order, which replaces that of 2012, empowers the Consell to approve on its own the update of the costs of taxi services.
In fact, the Consell will approve the proposed rates that the autonomous Executive decided not to include in the decree law approved on Monday. Torres considers it to be “reasonable” that the rate increase was not included in the decree law, in which only the price structure appears.
Taxi fare increase is not enough
Torres assumes that this increase is “insufficient” for the sector due to the strong increase in the cost of fuel that has occurred in recent months. It should be noted that the president of the Insular Taxi Federation, Antoni Riera, considered in March that before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is what caused the price of fuel to skyrocket, the increase in fares should be at least 10%. The president of the majority association of taxis in the city of Ibiza, Alejandro Cardell, said then that the increase should be placed at 17 or 18%.
Torres says that the Consell “is open to review what is necessary”, but, for this, the sector must “present the numbers to justify it”. Precisely, the rise that will be approved now is the proposal justified with the corresponding economic study that the taxi sector presented to the Consell at the end of January 2020 and that were validated by the technical services of the institution.
To modify the planned 3.4% rise, the sector would have to submit another study, which would prevent the rates from being updated before the start of this tourist season. “It is not worth throwing overboard, even if the increase that is now approved is slight, they are the numbers that the sector presented and that we validated based on the update of the CPI in recent years,” he indicates.
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