Benidorm reaches 2,500 grants to families

The Local Government Board (JGL) today approved a new remittance of municipal aid to families aimed at alleviating the economic and social effects caused by the Covid-19 pandemic for an amount of 198,800 euros. The mayor, Toni Pérez, has indicated that “with this new remittance, number 24, nearly 2,500 grants have already been granted and almost 2.1 million euros have been injected into the homes of the city that are suffering the most from the effects economic and social problems of the health crisis, thus evidencing that care for the residents of Benidorm is the top priority of this government ”.

The mayor recalled that "these grants range from 600 to 1,350 euros and are paid in three monthly installments"; and has reported that "to date the first 20 remittances have already been paid in full, while the beneficiaries of the remaining three have received one or two monthly payments depending on the case."

Toni Pérez has indicated that the Technical Commission, which is in charge of evaluating the requests to determine which applicants meet the requirements to receive the benefit, "has already processed more than 5,000 applications, 84% of those received." In this sense, the mayor has clarified that “practically in each meeting, the Technical Commission detects duplicate requests, because the same person has presented more than one request or has started a new procedure by providing additional documentation. When this happens, the duplication is corrected, which causes the actual number of requests to vary from one meeting to another, which is currently set at 5,962 ”.

He also advanced that "tomorrow the Technical Commission will meet again." The forecast is that in tomorrow's meeting “at least 650 requests of the around 950 pending processing will be resolved, so that before the end of November, the evaluation of all the requests received will have been completed and approved the payment of the amounts to all the beneficiaries ”. A payment, has clarified, that "as up to now, it will be made in three monthly installments."

The mayor recalled that initially the City Council reserved 1.4 million euros for these aid, an amount that corresponded to 20% of the surplus in 2019, the maximum percentage that the Government of Spain has allowed the City Councils to allocate to measures related to the coronavirus crisis. In the plenary session of last September, a budgetary modification was made possible to inject an additional 500,000 euros into these aid; While last week a second was processed for an amount of 420,000 euros. These more than 900,000 extraordinary euros come from the current resources of the 2020 budget -for which investments or current expenses planned for this year have been dispensed with-; and they raise to more than 2.3 million euros the money that the City Council is going to allocate to these aid.