The City Council enables an in-person help service to vote the proposals of the 2025 Participatory Budget

Benidorm City Council has enabled assistance and help services for all those citizens who want to participate in the voting on the proposals presented to the 2025 Participatory Budget but lack electronic means to vote on the internet. Councilor Ana Pellicer has indicated that "although this telematic vote is quite simple and intuitive,  the Department of Citizenship Participation has enabled a service for people who want to participate in the voting process and have some difficulty doing so."

Thus, this assistance will operate from today until June 30, when the voting period ends, from Monday to Friday and from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. In this section, municipal staff will be available to citizens in the City Hall offices to carry out this telematic vote, which will be done through a tablet. “People interested in this service can request an appointment during the established hours by calling 696 641 345, where they will be informed of the day they can come to vote for their favourite proposals,” added Pellicer.

The Councilor for Citizenship Participation recalled that this past Monday the City Council opened the voting period for the proposals presented for the 2025 Participatory Budget, a period that will end at 11:50 p.m. on June 30. As established by the Participatory Budget Self-Regulation, all registered persons over 18 years of age may participate in the voting process, the vote that will be carried out on the platform https://benidorm.governalia.es and by this municipal voting assistance service, in the case of people who cannot access the participation portal by themselves.

As Pellicer detailed, “In total 82 proposals have been presented, more than half relating to the area of ​​Urban Planning, Urban Scene and Mobility.” Specifically, of the actions or actions proposed by citizens, 43 – two of them the same – fall within this area; while 13 proposals have been presented in the Education, Culture, Youth and Sports block, and as many others in the area of ​​Environment and Street Cleaning – two of them with identical content. The Tourism, Beaches and Safety block has received nine proposals and four those related to Equality, Social Welfare, Health and the Elderly.

The councillor recalled that "through the Participatory Budget, citizens determine to which actions or projects part of the money reserved for investments must be allocated." "We are talking about a powerful tool, operational since 2016, and from which such interesting projects have emerged as children's play areas in the parks of l'Aigüera and Elche, the walkway that connects the Els Tolls neighbourhood with Palau d' Esports, the roundabout on Ricardo Bayona Avenue, the adaptation of the old road workers' house on Emilio Ortuño Street as an exhibition centre or the new park located on Marina Alta Avenue,” he added.

For this reason, Pellicer has encouraged citizens to “be an active part of this process, voting for the proposals that are most interesting to them among all those presented”, which can also be consulted on this same portal.

The next steps of the process

Once the period for submitting proposals has passed and once the current voting period ends, a technical commission will be in charge of evaluating and prioritizing the actions based on the criteria of distributive justice included in the bases of the Self-Regulation of the Participatory Budget 2025. Thus, will prioritize actions that contribute to satisfying the basic needs of the population (water, electricity, security, education, citizen coexistence, etc.); that help reduce social inequality (gender, income, ethnicity, or due to physical or mental disability); those that meet environmental sustainability criteria (having nearby, renewable, decentralized and self-sufficient resources); those that benefit a greater percentage of the population; or those in which it has not been invested before or has not been invested enough.

Subsequently, the proposals will be the subject of a technical and economic feasibility report by the City Council's technical staff, starting with the most scored and up to the maximum authorized spending limit. If any of the proposals are not technically viable, “it will be included in another list and the next most voted on the final prioritization list will be selected.”

Finally, the proposals approved by the Self-Regulation will be submitted to the Mayor's Office for processing, taking into account the order of priority resulting from the selection process, executing in the budgeted year those works that do not require a public competition or specific technical project or to be submitted to public exhibition.