The previous government of the Generalitat excluded Benidorm from all the works by Pla Edificant in May 2023

The former government of the Generalitat Valenciana, in the hands of PSOE and Compromís, cancelled last May all the works of the Edificant program planned and committed to Benidorm. This is evidenced by the documentation in the possession of the City Council, relating to each of the eight actions that had supposedly been authorized for inclusion in the program, and which this Wednesday was announced by the mayor of the city, Toni Pérez. The first mayor has accused the previous regional Executive of acting “with premeditation, nocturnality and treachery” for a decision that was adopted “a few days” before the municipal and regional elections of 2023 and with “absolute opacity”, since At no time did it notify the City Council of the suspension of said projects.

Specifically, the projects affected are those related to the public schools: Ausiàs March, Puig Campana, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Gabriel Miró, El Murtal, Els Tolls and Serra Aitana, and Mediterrània Highschool, which totalled an investment of 12, 8 million euros.

In his public appearance, Toni Pérez made an exhaustive review of all the steps taken by the City Council about these eight works that the autonomous government of PSPV and Compromís committed to executing in Benidorm.

Thus, the mayor recalled that on June 28, 2021, when a new phase of this program was announced, the plenary session was approved requesting prior accession to Pla Edificant with a total proposal of 20 works in 13 educational centres. From that moment, and for more than a year, the City Council was in charge of drafting the preliminary projects of the proposed actions.

In July 2022, when the new Edificant is officially announced, not a single one of the 20 proposals requested by Benidorm appears, after which a meeting with the Department of Education is requested to find out the reasons. After this, Pérez reported that on October 27, 2022, in a meeting held with the general director of Educational Infrastructures, "we are told to present all the preliminary projects because the requested works will be authorized", an indication that, in addition, "we are informed that the works of the IES Pere María Orts i Bosch are not going to be included within the Edificant because this action will be carried out directly by the Ministry, having been declared a priority in the Map of Educational Infrastructures presented in January 2016, six years earlier, by Ximo Puig and Vicent Marzà.”

The next step will occur in December 2022. “Eighteen months after having requested adherence to the plan, the Department communicates to the City Council via email the authorization of eight of the 20 proposed works,” explained Pérez, who pointed out that, “Of this package, the new headquarters of the Official Language School is left out.

After carrying out all the procedures required by the regional administration, on February 27, 2023, unanimously, the plenary session approved requesting the Department of Education to delegate powers to be able to carry out the authorized works in these seven schools and one institute in the city. , “the step before the effective delegation of powers that would allow the City Council to put out to tender the drafting of the projects” and the rest of the subsequent steps, explained Pérez.

Next, between March and May, depending on the case and after approving the adhesion to the program with the committed works, the Consistory sends the corresponding financial report to the Department, waiting to be able to begin the rest of the processing once they are definitively delegated. the powers of the previous autonomous Administration.

“Having not had more news about these projects from the Department of Education, and given the change of government in the Generalitat Valenciana, we requested a meeting with the new councilor and to our surprise at that meeting, held on January 9 – Pérez continues – with José Antonio Rovira and the general director of Educational Infrastructures, they inform us that before leaving the Palau de la Generalitat, Ximo Puig and his team finished in one fell swoop with the eight works that had been committed to Benidorm under the Edificant program, which were denied on May 9.”

Specifically, and as appears in the Edificant program management platform, on May 9, a note was included in each of the Benidorm actions, with the following content: “Following instructions from the General Directorate of Educational Infrastructures, it is without effect the economic report dated” March 28, 30 of that month or May 1, depending on the centre.

The mayor has denounced that "at the City Council we were not aware of this note and its consequences until last January, since they were not communicated to this local Administration at the time." “But we decided not to make noise about this and get to work immediately when everything that happened could be defined as a scandal,” he added. "And we do not say it. This is attested to by all the documents that we have now seen and also by a report from the municipal technician managing the Edificant platform on January 15,” Pérez lamented.

In the report, the technician maintains that he had “not received any notification on the Edificant platform or to my email of the continuation of the procedure until Wednesday the 10th of January.” On that date, emails were received in which the aforementioned note was mentioned “for each of the actions.”

The mayor added that "while Benidorm was denied every one of the projects, they rushed to approve proposals less necessary than ours", and pointed out that "there are municipalities our size or with a smaller park that has received a total of 13 works with 40 million euros and we do not know if it has anything to do with the fact that the government was socialist in those cities.” He has also criticized that some projects carried out with Edificant were “renovation of patios, replacement of fencing or installation of awnings, when what Benidorm was asking for was, for example, the renovation of a school centre where part of the building is propped up.”

With all this, and also given the silence of the previous Minister of Education, Vicent Marzà, who during his mandate avoided meeting with any municipal representative, the Benidorm councillor has regretted that “PSOE of Benidorm for eight years never spoke or claimed anything related to education in our city, nor health. And I don't want to think that it was because his party was directly responsible for both, but perhaps it was because he cared very little about education and the state of the centres. For this reason, he has called on the municipal opposition to "if you want to make noise, consider what you want to do it about, because, with statements like the ones they have launched on this matter, they are harming the educational communities, in yet another mockery of the that we are used to.”

Finally, Pérez has assured that the City Council has already had contacts with the current officials of the Department of Education to address the pending works in two priority schools: Ausiàs March and Vasco Núñez de Balboa. Thus, last week the mayor and the councillor of Education accompanied the general director of Educational Infrastructure of the Generalitat Valenciana, Rafael Valcárcel, and technicians from the Department of Education, to visit both schools, with the aim of "working side by side" so that these projects “can be resumed shortly, as they are necessary works but also of justice.”

“We are glad that things have changed in the Generalitat and that education and Benidorm, now, are a priority, and we have the best example with the imminent tender for the IES Pere Maria Orts i Bosch,” he added.

Previous Edificant program

Benidorm participated in the first edition of the Edificant program, with the creation of a multipurpose building on the CEIP Leonor Canalejas plot, which has become the headquarters of the Adult Training School and also houses the services of the Early Childhood and Primary.

In this case, "the investment of the previous Consell in the new educational building next to the Leonor Canalejas and adaptation of spaces in this centre was not 4 million as the PSOE has recently assured, but 2.9 million euros," he clarified. The first mayor In this regard, Pérez explained that "it was the City Council that had to assume, with municipal funds, close to 450,000 euros for the demolition of the old teachers' houses that were on the plot that the Ministry ignored and the modification of the work due to unforeseen causes." and additional actions about which the Ministry did not want to know anything either”, which added up to nearly half a million additional euros.

The management of the first Edificant project and the exclusion of the projects planned in the second phase of this plan reveal “what was the commitment of Ximo Puig's government to the Education of Benidorm”. “Just with the upcoming tender for the works of the IES Pere Mª Orts i Bosch, the Carlos Mazón Council has done more in six months for the Education of our city than its predecessors did in eight years,” he insisted.