Benidorm will request the Ministry to delegate the powers to be able to carry out the authorized works within the Edificant Plan

Benidorm government team will raise a motion to the next plenary session to ask the Department of Education for the delegation of powers so that the City Council can execute the works finally authorized by the regional administration within the Edificant Plan, and that will reach seven Education Centers and a Secondary Education Institute (IES). This is how the mayor, Toni Pérez, has advanced today, in a press conference together with the Councilor for Education, Maite Moreno has assured that "the City Council, in the part that is our responsibility, will be very fast and will continue speeding up the steps to the maximum” so that the authorized works can be carried out as soon as possible.

In this regard, Toni Pérez recalled that at the proposal of the local government, the plenary session requested in June 2021 to participate in the expansion of the Edificant Plan and to do so with 20 performances in 13 educational centers; actions all pending execution by the Ministry.

Since then, "the City Council has been in charge of drafting the drafts of the proposed actions, which were sent promptly to the Ministry." All this, he has clarified, "to try to expedite and speed up the resolution of the Edificant Plan while waiting to find out what works were going to be authorized" from the Ministry.

The Ministry's response arrived via email on December 20 - "18 months after the request" for adherence to the plan -, finally authorizing works in the CEIP Aitana, Ausiàs March, Gabriel Miró, Puig Campana, Els Tolls, Vasco Núñez de Balboa and El Murtal, and in the IES Mediterránea, for a global amount of 12.8 million euros.

The mayor has regretted that the Ministry has not attended to all the works that the City Council wanted to carry out, since "in the package" of those authorized "is not the so promised IES Pere Mª Orts i Bosch", which "is a priority for this local government and Benidorm”. Toni Pérez recalled that the City Council asked to be able to complete the 15% that remains pending for the expansion works of this center, as it did in the previous phase of the Edificant, but the request "has not been met by the Ministry."

Nor is "another priority work" included in the package: the construction of the new headquarters of the Official School of Languages (EOI), for which land was ceded to the Ministry and which since its start-up has been located in the Salt de l'Aigua study center, a municipally owned building. Also left out are the works proposed in the CEIP by Miguel Hernández, Mestre Gaspar López, and Serra Gelada.

Toni Pérez has detailed that since Education communicated the authorized projects, the following obligatory procedure has been complied with: the municipal school council and each center approve "the nomenclature" of the project sent by the Ministry. Now, once this procedure has been completed, "it is time to request that delegation of powers to be able to execute the works." "We understand that the Ministry should not take more than a month to reply", thus avoiding "new delays and delays" like those experienced so far.

The mayor has explained that once the Ministry accepts this delegation, a long administrative process begins, for the drafting of execution projects and bidding for works. That period, he has pointed out, "is going to be practically one year and that is the year that we have lost" as it took the Ministry 18 months to attend to the application for membership and project proposal made by Benidorm in June 2021.

Thus, if the Department's response had been agile "now we would be executing works" as "occurs in many other municipalities in the province and the Community". "But the water of May falls when it falls", he has concluded it.