A resident of El Puerto walks past the garbage accumulated next to the city's food market on March 7, the day the strike was called off after 11 days of strike."JUAN CARLOS TORO"
In less than a year, the City Council of El Puerto de Santa María has seen almost no police on the streets for months because they don't have pants;
no lifeguards on the beaches in the height of summer;
without a percussive hammer to officiate at burials;
with its municipal fleet immobilized for not having insurance and without email for not paying for the service.
Although it might seem so, the
annus horribilis
that strikes this Cadiz consistory is not the result of misfortune, nor is it limited to the last year.
The government team of PP and Ciudadanos denounces that the combination of the lack of personnel due to an adjustment plan and the excessive control of the Public Sector Contracts Law (of 2017) cause a perfect storm that "collapses" them.
But the opposition accuses the mayor, Germán Beardo, of knowing all these problems from the beginning and denounces his "incapacity and apathy."
The long list of setbacks that hit the municipal administration is narrated in detail in the local press, almost in a farce by installments.
The last one has left the city for 11 days with its streets full of garbage due to a strike called by the workers of a concession that had expired since November.
Among the reasons given by the workers for the strike was the deterioration of machinery that the company, FCC Environment, refuses to renew, given the expiration of the agreement with the City Council, as reported by the works council.
The strike ended on March 7, but the garbage and traces of Carnival confetti have taken days to disappear from the streets due to the lack of operational trucks that the city of 88,300 inhabitants continues to suffer from.
From one day to the next, more than 30 municipal cars – out of a fleet of almost 90 – ended up in January with a trap that the municipal police themselves placed, after the municipal fleet was supposedly left without insurance.
The Helvetia company made the drastic decision for a debt of 53,000 euros from two old invoices, despite the fact that the Consistory argued that the contract was in force, since it had paid the most recent payments.
Last December the City Council was without email service for days, after the contract it had with Microsoft had expired.
During a good part of the summer, the beaches of El Puerto did not have lifeguards —and, consequently, they lost their blue flags—, after not having drawn up the contract on time.
It was in the same days that the city did not have local police officers on the streets, as they claimed not to have pants because there was no contract in force to supply the garments.
The local Administration was even about to suffer a cut of the telephone lines due to another non-payment.
“That it happens in one or two contracts, okay, but it happens here in all of them,” Javier Botella, spokesman for Unión Portuense, denounces.
On the other hand, Javier Bello, second deputy mayor, acknowledges that the City Council suffers from a problem: "We have a collapsed administration in basic services because a councilor in 2012 decided to retire officials in an adjustment plan."
The mayor of the PP attributes to this plan, also carried out during a popular mandate, the beginning of some problems of thinning the workforce that have reached the extreme of going from 750 officials to the current 490.
The only possible way to overcome this inconvenience —and which they have followed to recover the depleted local police staff— involves modifications of that plan based on "the credits available in the budget", a slower, more tedious bureaucratic process that requires social dialog with template.
To this lack, the state law of Public Sector Contracts (of 2017) is added, which is so "supervisory with the local Administration that it makes the official have to dedicate more time to everything," according to Bello.
The obvious consequence is summed up by the councilman: "We don't take out the specifications on the date that they comply with the agreement."
In practice, each bureaucratic step in the Porto City Council becomes an odyssey with an uncertain term and end.
In fact, the current government team runs the city with constant patches to the 2018 budget (of about 99 million euros), made by the PSOE and IU, previous parties in charge.
And he assures that his desire to try to approve it runs into the reality of an Intervention service with few staff, in which its maximum responsible is on leave —the same one that they publicly confronted in August 2020 accusing her of paralyzing the City Council— and in which the head of the Bureau is accidentally doing that task.
David de la Encina, former mayor and spokesman for the municipal PSOE, does not believe them: “They said that they only needed to staple it, where is it?
Nor have they managed any specifications [for public bidding].
The same laws and problems are those that apply in any city council and it is evident that the result is not the same.
It's embarrassing.
When I ran into the same problems, they threw tomatoes at me and said they knew how to fix it.
The PP has settled into that argument.
They are bailing out water, but the shipwreck is evident”.
“The entire administrative procedure enters the funnel, both the administrative and the economic aspects”, explains Botella, “but they, with their manners, hinder it even more;
as opposition we have little to block because they bring little to the plenary sessions”.
Only the Department of Festivities seems to escape this dynamic of paralysis, with various events that have managed to arrive in time for Christmas or Carnival.
For the Unión Portuense it is a sign that "their councilor works like no one else."
For De la Encina it is an indication that the government team is trying to “cover with bread and circuses” a drift with an uncertain ending.
In the middle, some citizens who, as Bello himself assumes, can hardly understand why "those basic deficiencies are not resolved."
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