Populares Xàbia say they had just two hours to decide on the town’s biggest contract

Monday 31st May 2021 – PRESS RELEASE with Mike Smith

The spokeswoman of Populares Xàbia, Rosa Cardona, has released a statement in the aftermath of the award of the new contract for rubbish collection and street cleaning in Xàbia last week.

“These days there has been a lot of talk about the contract for rubbish collection and cleaning of streets and beaches, the most important in Xàbia, for the need to ensure a Clean Xàbia, which we have longed for in recent years,and because it is the largest town hall contract.

In the plenary session last Friday, the councillor of Services asked us to support this contract but her request came late. During the three years that it has taken to prepare the contract, it has become invisible, not only to the politicians but also to the residents, the traders, the hospitality sector, the gardening, painting and construction professionals. The municipal government will know enough about the continuous complaints from the residents to be able to have a global vision, but no-one has been able to contribute so this one has been a contract around which there has been so much confidentiality and secrecy that there has been zero participation.

A contract of this important should have been work on alongside informative and participatory meetings, with greater involvement in the preparing of the technical specifications and determining the conditions of the collection and cleaning service, and this find a solution that Xàbia deserves.

The confidentiality demanded by the companies from the rest of their competitors has led the opposition to have to decide blindly and with just two hours to review a project running to thousands of pages.

The contract has been award but it is the result of a list of technical conditions that we consider to be insufficient, such as the companies themselves proposing the frequency of the sweeping of the streets, the cleaning of the rubbish containers, and that we don’t have required individual shredders for garden refuse.

Nor is there any requirement for preventative cleaning in places which are prone to flooding, such as the gutters and ravines, and although this company has a camera for the gutters, it will not service much purpose if a shock plan was not demanded due to emergency situations.

We also don’t understand that if the company needs to increase its staff, why it will be need prior authorization from the town hall, or what the town hall needs to control the hiring of staff for a private company.

We come from an obsolete contract for our municipality, where successive extensions have affected the quality of service, but if, in the next eight years, the length of roads in the municipality increases, there will be no review or control to adapt to any new situations that occur, relapsing into the same error that we are suffering right now, one that the lower the quality of the collection and cleaning service.

The terms and conditions of the contract for the next municipal rubbish collection service were laid out in a technical sheet lacking consensus, But the Populares Xàbia group hope that company works diligently to remove all the weeds from the pavements and trees, clean the streets and containers, provide impeccable gutters which are free of cigarette butts, plastics and leaves, that their proposal for the green points – the rubbish collection points – will be a solution to prevent and increase in uncontrolled dumping and, above all, that the use of the Eco-Parque is improved.