By The Star Staff
Community leaders and organizations urged gubernatorial candidates Thursday to include in their platforms the hundreds of special communities in Puerto Rico that are in legal limbo because of a regulation that essentially declares them illegal.
The community leaders argued that the situation exists because the Office for Socioeconomic and Community Development of Puerto Rico (ODSEC by its acronym in Spanish), the government agency that is supposed to serve them, did not take them into account in the process of creating Regulation 9533, which imposes on the communities the government’s vision of how they should be organized, potentially impacting their ability to access services and economic resources.
“They have taken away rights from the special communities,” said Jannette Lozada Sabastro, an experienced community leader from Valle Hill in Canóvanas. “There is talk of a democracy that was murdered in this new regulation. The mayors and the director of ODSEC will choose the community leaders, and that is horrible.”
Like Lozada, community leaders and spokespersons for the non-profit organization Firmes, Unidos y Resilientes con la Abogacía (FURIA Inc.) denounced how the ODSEC imposed the Regulation for the Establishment of Community Boards, Regulation 9533, which they describe as an outrage.
The groups are calling for, in a collective manifesto, the repeal of the regulation to allow for community self-management and true collaboration with the communities.
“They have left the communities in a legal limbo because, due to the Regulation, the ODSEC could question the legitimacy of the existing community organizations, limit their self-managed organizational processes, and argue that they do not have the right to the support they request,” stated attorney Juan Capella Noya, from FURIA.
Adianez Vélez, associate attorney at FURIA, added: “The agency itself, in response to a request for information, clarified a few weeks ago that no community in Puerto Rico currently has a community board in accordance with Regulation 9533.”
Vélez said the controversial regulation, which has been questioned by the communities in court twice as undemocratic, requires all community boards to be endorsed by ODSEC and elected in an assembly convened by the agency. However, the office attached to the Governor’s Office “does not have the capacity” to organize these hundreds of assemblies and has not held any, the FURIA associate attorney said.
“The mistake has not only been ignoring the communities in the process, but they have not even taken into account their availability of resources for the implementation of the unjust regulation,” Vélez said.
Capella Noya pointed out that “[o]ver the past two and a half years, we have requested meetings with ODSEC on numerous occasions and were only granted one in 2023.”
“We have also not been given an official list of the special communities or details about the agency’s efforts to educate the communities and the process of implementing the regulations. None of this has been published, evidencing a lack of transparency,” he said. “We may have to go to court a third time to get information. This office does not fulfill the purpose for which it was created if it cannot relate to the communities.”
Maritza Ocasio, a community leader from the Usubal sector, in the Torrecilla Alta neighborhood of Canóvanas, charged that “they discriminate against us because they do not want to give us help to repair houses, because they say that according to ODSEC we are not a special community.”
“We live in the Nuevo Hogar Seguro Project, with cement houses from a project with funds subsidized by FEMA, but all the residents came from the special community of San Isidro,” she said. “It was a project to get out of poverty and now they do not recognize us as a vulnerable population.”
The communities will be collecting signatures for the “Community Manifesto for Respect and the Right to Community Self-Management,” in which they denounce Regulation 9533, approved on Feb. 1 of this year, despite having been challenged twice in court by community organizations from Canóvanas, Loíza, Naguabo, Lajas, Caguas and San Juan for violating rights of expression, association and community participation. The regulation allows the intervention of ODSEC in assemblies, requires the presence of its officials to elect boards, limits the terms of service of leaders, and imposes what the organizational body should be called, among other restrictions that impact community organizations.
“This law was supposed to be to help communities. Our proposal to all political candidates is that the person who wins the governorship should appoint an Executive Director of that agency, attached to La Fortaleza, who has some background of ties to the communities. It is time to rethink the role of ODSEC; the least that is needed is for the people who lead it to have the initiative.
“We have to speak directly with the communities,” said Vélez, the FURIA associate attorney. “That is not happening. There is a lot that can be done if there are serious conversations with the Special Communities.”
Comments