Yesterday the Government approved the construction project of the container dock in the northern expansion of the Port of Valencia for an amount of 656.7 million euros (VAT not included). The Executive highlighted that the new terminal, which MSC will be in charge of, will be “innovative, flexible and sustainable” and that the work is conceived “under strict criteria of environmental respect and coupled with the objective of diverting container traffic from the road to train.”
The news was greatly celebrated by the Port Authority of Valencia, whose president Mar Chao described it as “a historic moment and a reason for celebration and gratitude.” The Port will hold an extraordinary Board of Directors on Friday the 22nd to approve the bidding documents.
It’s now discount time. This is how the Generalitat Valenciana sees it, which will demand that all procedures for the bidding and start of works be declared urgent. “We have lost more than a year until the final approval has been reached and, from now on, any procedure that is carried out will be requested, both from the Government and the Port Authority of Valencia, to be done as quickly as possible” said the Minister of Infrastructure and Territory, Salomé Pradas.
The focus on respect for the environment and sustainability in transport that the Executive highlights was already highlighted by the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, when last Thursday he announced that the next Council of Ministers would give the green light to the project. The minister said that this was an “ecological project, 100% sustainable, self-sufficient and that it will be self-sufficient with clean energy.” Yesterday the Executive added that right now the Port is “close to its saturation point”, and argued that the project now approved seeks to “respond to the growth of activity and continue to be a reference infrastructure within global container traffic.”
The approval of the expansion puts an end to more than a decade of history about the Port. It has been more than ten years since the work on the first phase of the expansion was completed and yesterday, almost at the end of December, the problem was resolved. In between, there was a financial crisis that forced the project to be abandoned, the work was resumed and the opposition from the left – which governed in Valencia until May – managed to put it on hold at the Government table. The recent energy crisis also made it necessary to update the prices of a work that has skyrocketed its public cost from the 542 budgeted to 660 million euros. And the expansion has been, and shows signs of being, as this newspaper already reported, a key issue for the Valencian Community in the legislature that is now beginning.
Relevant, first, because of the new economic scenario that it aspires to and that is the origin of its purpose. The Port Authority affirms that the expansion and its future terminal will allow it to continue offering an “optimal service” to the Valencian economy. The economic sector has been very forceful in defending the importance of the expansion of the “number one port in the Mediterranean”, as pointed out by the president of the Business Confederation of the Valencian Community (CEV), Salvador Navarro, at the economic-business summit held in Madrid a few days ago, the last act of pressure on the Government.
Among the economic arguments, job creation is also key. The study promoted by Cámara Valencia, the CEV and the logistics lobby assured that in 2023, with the virtual terminal already operating, 23,225 jobs and another 5,111 indirect jobs would be created.
But the great obstacle of this time of impasse has been the environmental impact declaration (DIA) approved in 2007. For Podemos, and especially for Compromís, which does have representation in this legislature in the Valencian parliament and in the Government at Through Sumar, the EIA is not valid because “it has an expired environmental impact declaration and all the official technical reports against it,” the training assures.
With this argument, and with others, the formation warns that it will fight the judicial battle with the help of the Ciutat-Port commission that yesterday, together with other environmental entities such as Greenpeace, asked to meet with the minister to propose that the expansion “does not respond to “no real need for the economy of the territory” and that the work “represents a disproportionate volume of public spending to satisfy private interests.”
