The counselor of Mobility, Digital Transformation, and Artificial Intelligence of the Junta de Castilla y León, Cristina Sanchidrián, has redefined the Guardo (Palencia) variant as a "strategic" action, while specifying that the proposal presented included a cost increase of 45 percent, an increase that the Ministry could not assume "from a legal point of view nor from an economic point of view."
During her speech at the Plenary of the Cortes of Castilla y León, in response to the socialist representative Miguel Ángel Blanco, Sanchidrián emphasized that the infrastructure has a "vocation of continuity" and framed it as "a commitment of the legislature" that requires addressing the work "with rigor, responsibility, and all safety guarantees," given that it is a project with "extraordinary technical complexity."
The head of Mobility also explained that it is essential to complete the liquidation and termination of the previous contract in order to update the project and, from there, to re-tender the execution of the variant.
In his speech, the socialist parliamentarian Miguel Ángel Blanco highlighted the successive delays that this infrastructure has faced since the initial drafting of the project in 2007 and demanded a specific date for the completion of the road that connects the CL-626 with the CL-615.
Blanco also criticized the cut in the funding planned for the execution project in the upcoming regional budgets and accused the regional government of leaving the inhabitants of Guardo and the entire region "abandoned to their fate," suffering deficits in both road communications and essential public services.
In her final turn, Sanchidrián replied that the Junta maintains its investment commitment in the area and claimed the actions already executed in the province's road network, such as the commissioning in 2020 of the eastern connection of the variant, with 1.25 million euros, the works on the CL-621-27 between Cervera and Potes, with almost 10 million, and the reinforcement interventions on the CL-615 and CL-626.
For this reason, she insisted that the Ministry continues "working, investing, and making decisions" against those who, in her opinion, use the technical difficulties of the infrastructure as an argument in political confrontation.