The Education Department delegates to Benidorm City Council the powers to strengthen the structure of the Ausiàs March school with 2 million euros

The Department of Education, Culture, Universities and Employment of the Generalitat Valenciana has taken the first step towards delegating powers to the Benidorm City Council in matters of educational infrastructure to carry out the structural reinforcement and improvement works of the facilities of the Ausiàs March public infant and primary school. This was announced on Monday by the mayor of the city, Toni Pérez, who has announced that “the next step will be to include in the agenda of the next ordinary plenary session in September a motion to accept this delegation of powers so that we can put out to tender the drafting of the execution project and begin the works in the shortest possible time.”

Toni Pérez explained that the preliminary project to meet the needs of this centre “values ​​the works at 2,027,857.24 euros” and that it provides for “structural reinforcement, improvement of the envelope, improvement of energy efficiency, adaptation of accessibility, evacuation, facilities and common areas”, so that “we are going to address a demand that the City Council and the educational community have been demanding for a long time, but which was never attended to by the previous regional Administration”.

The CEIP Ausiàs March has structural problems that at one time forced the shoring up of part of one of its classrooms and the closure of several classrooms due to the cracks that appeared as a result of the poor condition of the slab. The mayor recalled that the Generalitat “committed itself in 2016 to carry out the works, so it never agreed to incorporate them into previous editions of the Edificant Plan despite municipal requests to assume the delegation”. “However – he continued – the City Council drafted and presented to the Ministry of Education in 2022 a project, valued at 1.7 million euros at the time, requesting its inclusion in the Edificant project to resolve a good part of the existing problems and also provide other improvements to the centre, such as the construction of a multipurpose room, the expansion of the dining room or the installation of accessible ramps”, among others.

The City Council again requested the delegation of powers to carry out these works on March 8, 2023, and “despite being a work that was committed to by the previous Botànic government, PSOE and Compromís cancelled this and other investments in educational centres in Benidorm in May of that same year, just a few days before the municipal and regional elections”, recalled Toni Pérez.

Now, after the municipal efforts to resume the pending projects, the department headed by José Antonio Rovira has issued a resolution proposal, signed by the general director of Educational Infrastructures, José María Llarena, and the undersecretary of the Department of Education, Culture, Universities and Employment, Alida Mas. Pérez explained that this proposal is the one that the City Council must now accept in the next plenary session so that the Department can later convert it into a definitive one, with an economic forecast that will be broken down into two annual payments: 700,000 euros in the 2025 financial year and the remaining 1,327,857.24 in 2026, as stated in the resolution itself.

According to Pérez, “As with other projects in the Edificant Plan, such as the building next to the Leonor Canalejas school, once these administrative procedures have been completed, the City Council will be the one to tender and supervise the execution of the works, which will allow us to greatly speed up the procedures and ensure that the repairs to Ausiàs March, which are so necessary and so much requested, can become a reality very soon”.

Finally, the mayor thanked the Ministry of Education “for the interest shown from the very first minute in addressing the needs in terms of educational infrastructure that until now had not been addressed in Benidorm” and gave as examples “the tendering of the works for the IES Pere Maria Orts, with a budget exceeding 14 million euros, and now the delegation of powers to resolve for once the problems that the CEIP Ausiàs March is dragging along, to which we do not doubt that more projects will be added”.