The Maçanet de la Selva City Council will make a new concession for a company to provide water service in the municipality.
The government team reports in a statement that the January plenary session has approved this formula “to guarantee good service and not mortgage the council exclusively with this expense.”
The mayor, Natàlia Figueras, recalls that the City Council planned to municipalize the service and assume management through a 100% municipal commercial company.
When the council had the Master Plan for the water service of the entire municipality, they saw that it was “unfeasible” to assume the investment that the network needs, both in the urbanizations and in the core. According to Figueras, direct management would mean “impoverishing the City Council.”
The management will be indirect because the City Council continues to own the network but will make a concession to a company, which will be in charge of providing the service.
The municipality has yet to put out to tender the new concession, since the current one has expired since 1997.
“In almost 30 years the water management service has not been updated and therefore, the changes and new needs of the municipality have not been taken into account,” explains the mayor.
The City Council initially planned to manage the service through a 100% municipal commercial company. The results of the service’s master plan, exposing the investment needs to update the network, have made Maçanet de la Selva see it as “unfeasible” to manage it through a municipal company due to “the complexity of the service” in some parts of the municipality. , such as in Maçanet Residencial Parc.
The government team points out that the infrastructure improvement work alone amounts to at least 6 million euros. “We cannot acquire this expense because we would impoverish the City Council,” argues the mayor.
According to Figueras, the new concession is a “necessary step” to guarantee that the municipality has drinking water in the future.
Last May, the City Council took over the water management of the Maçanet Residencial Parc urbanization “as a matter of urgency” after the constant supply cuts and because the previous private manager “could not guarantee continuity with minimal health conditions of the water”.
