Just think what NYC Bettors and NYC OTB employees.........
Europe's Recession Sparks Grass-Roots Political Push
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By ILAN BRAT and CHRISTOPHER BJORK
As corruption scandals make headlines in
Spain, citizens are pushing for reform. A newly elected mayor in
Torrelodones is taking steps to increase transparency in government.
WSJ's Ilan Brat reports. (Photo: Antonio Heredia)
The stay-at-home mom became a civic gadfly after local authorities refused to fix a broken sewer pipe, and one cause led to another: She formed a group to defend a forest against real-estate developers. After six years of fighting Town Hall, Ms. Biurrun was elected mayor.
Two years into her term, Ms. Biurrun has become a national figure, a role model for a fledgling clean-government movement taking root in Spain. The 39-year-old mayor has opened the Town Council to more citizen input, abolished many official perks and plowed the savings into school and road repairs, with enough left over to build bike lanes and refurbish a soccer field.
"Those who govern need to know that the legitimacy of the vote doesn't mean they have a blank check for four years," Ms. Biurrun said.
She regularly receives invitations to speak at forums around the country, appears on radio and has been profiled by one of Spain's leading TV news magazines.
"People are starting to get really fed up," Ms. Biurrun said. "You're starting to see initiatives like ours."
Rather than tuning out a political system plagued by allegations of cronyism, secrecy and embezzlement, many Spaniards are turning to grass-roots activism.
The number of Spaniards involved in political activity other than voting or joining street demonstrations grew to 39% in 2010 from 27% in 2008, according to the latest data from the London-based European Social Survey.
The fervor is driven by the pain of Spain's recession, including its 27.2% jobless rate, and a sense that many political leaders got rich during a real-estate boom that went bust in 2008. Since then, criminal investigations have unfolded in nearly every major Spanish city and targeted every level of government.
Upstarts are trying to snatch support from two dominant national parties by promising greater openness and better management. If an election were held today, the Union for Progress and Democracy, an alliance of progressive and conservative clean-government forces, would win 13.1% of the vote, nearly tripling its tally in the November 2011 election, according to a May survey by independent Spanish polling firm Metroscopia. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's Popular Party would get 22.5%, losing nearly half its support.
![[image]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-BL604_SPMAYO_NS_20130520174503.jpg)
Italy's antiestablishment Five Star Movement, led by comedian Beppe Grillo, got almost a quarter of the vote in February's national election following a campaign for better governance. Five months earlier it won the largest share of the vote in Sicily's regional assembly election and made good on an austerity pledge: Its 15 elected representatives are donating 70% of their €8,000, or about $10,000, monthly salaries to a fund to extend credit to small and medium-size companies.
The Greek city of Thessaloniki cut costs after Yannis Boutaris, a businessman-turned-politician, took office in late 2010 and ended City Hall's relationship with a few selected providers. Competitive bidding has saved the city 80% of its previous spending on accounting, 25% on waste disposal trucks and 20% on printer paper. The savings have allowed Mr. Boutaris to spend more on social services, even while cutting taxes and paying down City Hall's debt to suppliers.
Grass-roots pressure is strong in Spain, particularly in local initiatives to open city government to public scrutiny. Thirty-three of Spain's 110 biggest cities scored top grades last year on Transparency International's transparency index, up from one in 2008. The regional government of Navarra last year enacted the country's first open-records law; Spain's central government is drafting a similar bill.
Official perks are getting cut. In Castilla-La Mancha, the cash-strapped regional government has auctioned off dozens of official cars and marked more than 400 for future sale. In Ontinyent, a small city in the Valencia region, an administration that includes clean-government activists shut down a public television station that critics say had become the former mayor's mouthpiece.
Antonio Heredia for The Wall Street Journal
Ms. Biurrun checks a map
showing the location of a planned high-end housing development with
council members Raquel Fernández and Santiago Fernández.
"Until now, Spain's political parties didn't have the incentives to take corruption too seriously because voters didn't really punish them for it while the economy grew," said Fernando Jiménez, an expert on government corruption at the University of Murcia.
The backlash has taken many forms. A group called Record Your City Council Meeting makes video recordings of public meetings and posts them online, risking fines where such reporting is banned. Activists secured more than 1.4 million signatures for a relaxation of Spain's strict home-foreclosure laws, prompting Parliament to reconsider them.
"People are becoming aware that they need to participate in institutions to make them more democratic," said Mario Cuellar, a member of the video-recording group. "We need to reclaim politics from the chorizos," using a slang term for thieves.
Torrelodones seemed an unlikely place for a reformist insurgency—a well-to-do bedroom community of about 22,000, 18 miles northwest of Madrid. Gen. Franco vacationed in a hilltop palace here. The conservative Popular Party ran the town for a generation starting in 1987.
And Ms. Biurrun seemed an unlikely insurgent. The daughter of film editors, she had grown up elsewhere in the Madrid region, studied law and moved here in 2000. After working as a publicist, she had opted to stay home with her two young children while helping her uncle write radio scripts.
In 2005 she complained about the sewage spilling into a stream near her house. Bureaucrats at Town Hall dismissed her, she said, but she continued going there twice a week.
By the time the spill was stopped months later, Ms. Biurrun found another target: a proposed 1,400-home development and golf course on government-protected forest land near her house.
More than 300 families joined her environmental group and crowded town council meetings with green handkerchiefs on their necks to protest the proposed development. Stymied, they formed the Neighbors for Torrelodones party and won four of the council's 17 seats in the 2007 election, forming an opposition to longtime Mayor Carlos Galbeño of the Popular Party.
"Ultimately, you have to tackle politics on the same footing as the politicians," said Rosa Rivet, one of the environmental group's founders.
“Ms. Biurrun got rid of the police escort and the leased car, and gave the chauffeur a different job.”The Neighbors called Mr. Galbeño's administration a symbol of waste and secrecy. A town employee chauffeured the mayor in a leased black Volkswagen VOW3.XE -1.29% Passat with a police escort. A black rope blocked access to his office. He convened council meetings in the morning, when fewer working people could attend.
Facing opposition from the Neighbors, Mr. Galbeño dropped a proposal to raise his own salary by 35%, to €91,445 ($117,400) a year, and later trimmed his salary by 7.5%. But he and his allies blocked other Neighbors' initiatives, including one to broadcast council meetings live, according to meeting transcripts.
The fight over the planned mega-development came to a head. Eventually, the project was dropped. The Madrid regional government said it violated environmental regulations.
Mr. Galbeño didn't stand for re-election in 2011 under pressure from his party, said Javier Laorden, who replaced him on the ticket. A judge at a court near Madrid is investigating allegations by former Popular Party council members that Mr. Galbeño spied on members of the council. He declined to comment on his record as mayor; his lawyer said the spying allegations were false.
In May that year the Popular Party swept most municipal elections in Spain, but not in Torrelodones. Ms. Biurrun and other Neighbors campaigned door-to-door with pledges to cut costs and to make government more transparent. They won nine seats on the now 21-member council and picked up support from two parties that had won a seat apiece, securing Ms. Biurrun's election as mayor.
At her inauguration Ms. Biurrun choked up before a jubilant crowd.
Then she began slashing away. She lowered the mayor's salary by 21%, to €49,500 a year, trimmed council members' salaries and eliminated four paid advisory positions.
She got rid of the police escort and the leased car, and gave the chauffeur a different job. She returned a carpet, emblazoned with the town seal, that had cost nearly €300 a month to clean. She ordered council members to pay for their own meals at work events instead of billing the town.
"I was so indignant seeing what these people had been doing with everyone's money as if it were their own," Ms. Biurrun said.
Those cuts, combined with savings achieved by renegotiating contracts for garbage pickup and other services, helped give a million-euro boost to the city treasury in her first year in office. That enabled her to limit the kind of painful austerity forced on other Spanish communities; the town preserved psychological counseling services for about 20 children, for example, even while cutting it for about 50 adults.
Town Hall's accounts now go online every three months, a practice relatively uncommon in Spain. Citizens may ask questions at council meetings, which Ms. Biurrun moved to evenings and arranged to have transmitted live on the radio and online. Her government has reactivated citizen advisory panels and responded to grass-roots initiatives; after more than a year of lobbying by civic groups, it agreed to set aside 48 parcels on half an acre of land where residents chosen by lottery can grow food.
Many applaud the changes. Antonio Palacios, a university professor, said all political parties, not just the one in charge, get space for their views in the town's official magazine. "It's an interesting experience that could be exported to other cities," he said.
But Ms. Biurrun and her team have made themselves unpopular in some quarters by displaying what their critics call a combative, imperious attitude typical of Spain's political culture. In response, she said her administration listens to others and makes public far more information than the previous one did.
"They don't admit any criticism," said Miguel Ángel Estalayo, who publishes La Voz de Torrelodones y Hoyo de Manzanares, a monthly newspaper that needles Town Hall the way Ms. Biurrun once did. One of its reports documented the felling of 71 pine trees to make way for a bike lane.
Ms. Biurrun's administration withdrew Town Hall advertising from La Voz—reprisal, Mr. Estalayo said, for the paper's reporting. He said the previous administration once pulled its ads for the same reason. Ángel Guirao, the council member now in charge of communications, said the ads were more cost-effective in a publication with wider circulation.
Last year the mayor alienated the Socialists and Actúa, the minority parties that helped elect her, by aligning with her old nemesis, the Popular Party, behind a regional government water- and sewage-management plan. The minority parties abhorred the plan, which would privatize the town's services and raise water bills slightly. The mayor said the town had no other practical option and would get €1.3 million for badly needed sewer repairs.
Then there was the tempest over Torrelodones' medieval tower.
In December, Ricardo Roquero, chairman of a local cultural association, was giving schoolchildren a tour when he saw workers drilling on the tower's walls and asked, "What on Earth are you doing?"
They were wrapping the tower in a giant red canvas with a white bow. Town Hall had conjured up a Christmas campaign called "Gift yourself Torrelodones" to draw publicity and visitors.
Many townspeople voiced outrage. A historic monument was being pierced with two-inch metal screws for an advertising stunt.
The Neighbors acknowledge that they had failed to get a regional government permit. But they brushed off the criticism. Ms. Biurrun said the resulting press coverage more than compensated for the project's €26,000 cost.
Despite his reservations, Mr. Roquero said he welcomes the new government: "I'm very critical of the Neighbors, but with the situation that Spain is in, what's worth more—the breath of fresh air these people represent, or their inevitable errors? For me, it's the idea that any citizen can influence public life."
—Nektaria Stamouli in Athens and Gilles Castonguay in Milan contributed to this article. Write to Ilan Brat at ilan.brat@wsj.com and Christopher Bjork at christopher.bjork@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared May 21,
2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with
the headline: As Europe Slumps, Grass-Roots Grow.
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