Vaersa will compensate Benidorm for having overcharged it since 2015 in the transport of waste

The public company that manages Benidorm Waste Transfer Station, Vaersa, will compensate the city for overcharging for waste transportation since 2015, an amount estimated at 102,990.99 euros that derives from not having applied that year the annual variation of the CPI, which was negative.

This matter will be ruled on in the next Urban Planning Information Commission to be held on Monday, April 29, and subsequently elevated to the Local Government Board, as specified by the Councilor for Street Cleaning, Luis Navarro, who has also indicated that compensation will be made through the application for one year of a discount for each ton deposited in the Transfer Plant.

The City Council has decided to address the proposal presented by Vaersa, considering it “adequate and acceptable,” according to Navarro. However, municipal technicians indicate that some doubts and unresolved issues must be resolved and that they are included in the technical reports.

The situation has its origins in 2015 when the public company did not apply the negative variation of the CPI to its prices. Benidorm City Council demanded on several occasions a correction and review of the billing criteria after detecting “differences” between the data provided by Vaersa and those provided by the Waste Consortium at the entrance to El Campello Recovery Plant.

After the plenary session agreed in May 2023 to ask the Ministry to urge Vaersa to adjust the real price of the service it provides, the company communicated in February of this year its resolution on the fee to be applied in 2024 for the Transfer Plant. This price is €20.37/Tn, considered “adjusted” by municipal technicians. The proposal includes a discount of €1.67/Tn to compensate for the amount invoiced in excess due to the fee erroneously applied from 2015 to 2023.

According to the municipal Engineering department, this extra billing amounts to 89,117.28 euros, to which 13,873.71 euros of legal interest must be added, with a total of 102,990.99 euros.

However, as noted before, technicians demand that the public company resolve some issues. The first is related to the discount that will be applied since the proposal does not specify whether the fee is with VAT or without it, "which would greatly modify the proposal," said the Councilor for Street Cleaning. Thus, the applicable discount with VAT included would be €1.67/Tn and without VAT it would be €1.52/Tn. Likewise, it is pointed out that the amount of waste that would need to be deposited in 2024 for the discount applied by Vaersa to compensate for the extra billed "is higher than what was planned for this year, so it is possible that this method will not allow recovery in one year the total owed to the City Council” said Navarro.

Likewise, the City Council has other demands that Vaersa must address related to divergences in the price structure, the adequacy of the price, the adequacy of production, common expenses and the characterization of biowaste.