The candidate for mayor of Dénia de Podem, Juanjo Nieves, has proposed municipalizing the management of the majority of services that the Socialist Party has privatized these 4 years of absolute majority and that have meant an increase in total spending of more than 3 million euros per year in sectors in which the City Council already had departments and workers to perform them with adequate reinforcement.
For Nieves, the strategy has always been the same, “places for municipal service workers who retired or transferred and were not covered were amortized (eliminated). At the same time, large contracts were offered to cover these services by private companies, while municipal posts for highly paid senior technicians, coordinators, and bureau chiefs were created to deal with these companies.
The local Podem spokesperson has given several examples. On the one hand, “the new municipal cleaning contract represents more than 1.350.000 euros a year, when until 2019 the City Council had municipal cleaners whose positions have been eliminated. The gardening department is another of those that have been reduced to increase the privatized areas. Thus, the pruning contract alone represents more than 540.000 euros every two years, when the City Council has a pruner on staff and other gardeners who could qualify as pruners without the need to fatten the coffers of a private company. In addition, there are several "minor" gardening contracts with companies that add up to another 250.000 euros a year. The icing on the cake this year was the privatization for 15 years of municipal lighting for more than 850.000 euros each year, when the City Council also has a brigade of electricians.
For the purple candidate, this "privatization fever" has spread to other departments, "for example, areas as sensitive as the selection of public personnel have been privatized through the convene platform, advice on budget reports on intervention or urban planning and the defense and legal advice, in a City Council that has more than 30 lawyers on staff. In this way, municipal officials are ignored and see how minor tasks are assigned to them, while large companies assume their most important functions. "A transformative city council should bet on public management, and a reasonable reinforcement of the workforce to assume these functions, which costs well less than 3 million euros a year," said Nieves.
"A lot of privatizations and little quality"
For number 2 on the Podem Dénia list, Cristina Molinillo, «these neoliberal policies translate into a deterioration in the conditions of the workers who provide these services. Thus, for example, the workers of the company that has obtained the cleaning of municipal offices, Limcamar, have reduced hours to continue earning less than 1.000 euros, which marks the minimum wage, but with the same workload, without having access to supplements festivity or turnicity, with which, in the end, vulnerable and precarious women are the victims of these privatizations”.
Molinillo also points out: «Although we are committed to public management, it is also surprising that the management of this service is granted for almost 3 million euros every 2 years to a company that is neither from Dénia nor from the Marina Alta, nor of the Valencian Community, when there are small local cleaning companies that could assume part of that work ». The purple formation is also impressed by the duration of the contracts, which in many cases are 10, and even 15 years. «An example is the contract with Urbaser for waste management, lasting 10 years, with a total amount of 75 million euros, with which the next 3 municipal corporations will be mortgaged and will have to swallow these contracts without having carried them out, that Yes, the citizens will continue to pay the corresponding garbage fee to maintain the company for 10 years, while other progressive town halls in the Marina Alta are committed to management through public companies in strategic sectors such as water or waste management» .
