Burning certificates and Bonfire Night

Today, the 5th, Bonfire Night, has been rainy. Until today, the month had been deep blue skies and temperatures in the high twenties. You don't fool the trees though - it may still be warmer here than most summer days in England but it's Autumn; time for leaves to fall. Raking or sweeping them up has become one of my daily jobs. I collect them in one of the capazos, big, bendy 55 litre buckets. Once they were made of woven esparto grass now they are rubber or plastic. So simple and so useful.

There is a lot of fallow land around our house so something as innocuous as fallen leaves are easy to dispose of. Not so with the prunings from our various fruit trees or the mound of fronds left behind after our palm got a long overdue haircut. If I owned a trailer I could haul the prunings to the local tip. Sorry, I shouldn't call it a tip any more. It's an ecopark where they collect, sort and recycle waste. I presume that, at the ecopark, they shred the garden waste for compost or something equally environmentally sound. I have no trailer though, so, environmental vandalism it has to be.

It's not acceptable to just pile things into a heap and set fire to them. You have to get a certificate to burn. The certificate tells you what you can and what you can't do - not near roads, not near uninterrupted vegetation, only at such times, with water to hand and so on. You also have to check the local alerts before lighting the blue touch paper. Sensible regulations.

In the past to get a certificate I went to the local town hall, talked to someone behind a desk who took my details and, a couple of days later, when the appropriate councillor had signed the permit, I went back to get the paperwork. More recently they started to send the certificates by email. 

The Pinoso Town Hall website is a disgrace. Unlike most "government" websites, which have been getting better, the Pinoso website got worse when it was updated a few years ago. Some of that was because of new data protection regulations but most of it is because it's badly designed. I also suspect that there is an intentionality to not supply information. On the transparency page, for instance, there is a heading for the 2018 accounts. Presumably it's a bit early to add the 2020 budgets or the 2019 accounts. Click on the 2018 heading though and you'll find that the sections are empty. 

Nowadays the website really only serves for reading the local news and even then only so long as you don't mind party propaganda. That's not quite fair. There's a page called incidencias which you can use to report problems and make suggestions and that bit of the website works fine.

A part of the Pinoso website is a virtual office which supposedly allows you to carry out some administrative steps online. Somebody told me that you could apply for the burning certificates there. I looked and I looked but I found nothing.

In the end it proved a lot faster to drive in to town and go to the town hall. There, before the alcohol gel had dried on my hands, someone had given me a small piece of paper with an email address and details of the information I needed to supply to get a burning certificate. I emailed the details the same afternoon and, a couple of days later I got the certificate. Nice and easy. In fact, I wondered why somebody hadn't thought to put that information on that scrap of paper onto the website but, hey ho.