It has been more than twelve years, in 2012, that the Sagrera should have been operational. It will be – if one day the works are completed – the great station of Barcelona, ??where conventional and high-speed railways, the metro, city and intercity buses will meet. Today, the Department of Territory of the Generalitat calculates that 64% of the civil work has been executed and that it could be underway in 2027, i.e. 15 years later than planned, but there is no an official date by the State. The responsibility lies with Adif, the society that last year only spent one out of every five euros available in Catalonia.
According to the Generalitat, “adif initially planned to execute a new project to put it into service in phases, but currently, since the pace of execution is higher, no phases are planned”. The timelines that Territori is working with are that “the civil works will be finished in 2025 and that the bidding for the architectural works will be promoted in the same year, so that commissioning is not expected before 2027”. Territory adds that Adif received 255 million in extra funding for the application of the third additional provision of the Statute “that have been allocated to other actions”.
That of Sagrera is one of the examples of the direct consequences of low budget execution in Catalonia. It is a sign that beyond the cold numbers, the lack of diligence when investing causes direct harm to citizens.
Lluís Moreno, president of the Chamber of Works Contractors of Catalonia (CCOC), explains that “there are some budgeted investments, such as the national Pirenaica de Portbou in Viella, in which nothing has been done even though they were assigned 260 million in 2023”. Moreno adds that something similar happened with the pacification of National II in Maresme or the improvements to AP-7.
Although perhaps the work that has suffered the most is Rodalies, which – in the words of the president of the CCOC – has slowed down in recent years. The commuter train service is one of the things that causes the most headaches for citizens. Territory assures that the 2021-2030 plan is currently in force and recalls that this project took place “without any processing and without the Government’s competition”. The information that the Generalitat has is that “the number of contracted actions” amounts to 3,251 million euros, a figure that would exceed half of the total investment foreseen by the plan (6,342 million) and achieves two thirds of the investment programmed within of the period 2020-2025. What the Generalitat says it does not know is what it means for the work to be “contracted”, because it is not specified whether it is tendered, awarded or in another situation.
The president of the CCOC believes that there are two main reasons that explain why the low investments. The first is the bottlenecks that occur when carrying out administrative authorizations. The other is the proliferation of various platforms that slow down the launch of projects.
