De Zárate:"This government is not doubling expenses for technical works"

There are three technicians who perform extraordinary works based on an agreement of the Board of Government of October 2014

The City Council consumed at the end of the year the bag of hours contracted to a consultancy to reinforce the area of ​​Engineering

The spokesman of the local government, José Ramón González de Zárate, responded to the statements made on Tuesday by the PSOE municipal group regarding expenditure on control, management, assistance and technical inspection of works. De Zárate has stressed that "this government is not doubling expenses for this work although the socialist spokesman, Rubén Martínez insists, because at the moment there is no external contract and only are being paid the extraordinary services actually provided by technicians ".

De Zárate explained that in October 2014, being Martínez councilor for the PSOE-Liberal bipartite, the Local Government Board approved a proposal that "for technical reasons" and "necessity" three technical engineers be authorized to "work extra hours". The same agreement, the spokesman said, included the allowance for "overtime" actually performed and has been maintained ever since.

"By the end of 2016, and with a volume of public work infinitely superior to that of 2014, it became clear that with these services and overtime it was not possible to carry out all the work and all the projects," he said. Therefore, "it became necessary to resort to an external company to relieve the workload of technicians, meet deadlines and leave no standing records."

After requesting budgets from three companies, the City of Benidorm contracted at the beginning of November for 16,988.99 euros to a consultant to elaborate valued technical memories of municipal works; And to provide technical assistance for the drafting of projects, management of works and coordination of safety and health work. The contract also included "technical assistance for the drafting of urban planning reports" and "technical assistance in monitoring and control of works carried out in the municipality".

The spokesman explained that "the contract marked a bag of 650 hours of technical work, which were consumed at the end of the year," as reflected in the invoice presented by the consultancy on December 30. "Among the work carried out by this company, there are some as important as the environmental assessment of the Internal Reform Projects (PRI) submitted by three hotels, the suitability report of the skateboard, or the report on the Declaration of Community Interest (DIC) of a camping ". The realization of these works "has allowed our technicians to focus on other key projects to improve the urban scene of Benidorm in recent months and whose results are in view of all citizens.

Exhausted that external contract, as in 2016 and at the request of the Economic Area, the government has transferred "a prevision of the overtime that the three municipal technical engineers could carry out throughout the year." A forecast that has also been transferred from other departments and "does not imply that all those hours will be made and, therefore, that the total amount planned", amounting to about 24,000 euros, will be paid. "At the end of the year," he added, "this prevision may have been fulfilled or may have been done more or less, something that will be determined in any case by the volume of work and the needs of the service."

After these clarifications, De Zárate has accused the Socialist spokesman of "wanting to confuse the citizenship by offering absolutely biased information", and added that the false accusations of Martínez "are fruit of the impotence that the socialists feel when seeing that we are doing works and projects in the city that they were unable even to imagine when they ruled. "