The People’s Party governing team of Torrevieja City Council has approved an additional cost of 1,128,021 euro at Monday’s, 25th May, regular May plenary session. The funds will cover the purchase of 877 more rubbish containers than were initially specified in the tender documents for the Torrevieja waste collection and street cleaning contract. This contract, which commenced its rollout in June 2022, carries an annual cost of 25 million euro to the municipal coffers.
María José Ruiz, the Councillor for Urban Cleaning, justified the acquisition during the plenary session by explaining that the terms of the current contract were approved back in 2019, while the service itself was launched in mid-2022. She pointed out that between that date and the present, the municipality has gained more than ten thousand inhabitants, which caused their original forecasts to become outdated.
Although the councillor for the area attempted to convey that the unexpected purchase was a current necessity, the invoice had actually been held in a drawer for some time, dating back to the end of 2024. The City Council ordered more and more equipment as the containerisation project began in the second half of 2022, following continuous protests from residents in residential areas regarding the distance, scarcity, and concentrated distribution of the containers in designated areas. These complaints led the political leaders of the area—amounting to three councillors in five years—to improvise and order more containers with the approval of the technical staff. This was particularly the case at the start of the contract, just prior to the municipal elections.
The original technical specifications for Torrevieja’s waste collection service already stipulated a substantial minimum number of containers. This included 1,142 for mixed waste, another 1,142 for organic waste or bio-waste (which are still not out on the streets), 446 for packaging, and 446 for paper and cardboard. In addition to these, 94 underground 1,000-litre containers are planned.
Officially added to these numbers now—although they have already been deployed across the municipality for some time—are 285 extra containers for packaging, 294 containers for cardboard, and another 298 containers for municipal solid waste. All of these have a capacity of 3,200 litres, bringing the total number of additional units to 877.
The invoice, dated late 2024, includes an image of the stored containers. However, the technical report justifying the purchase mistakenly refers to a document related to a completely different City Council contract. That separate contract concerns the adaptation of a church on Tritón Street, which was acquired by the municipality from the Orihuela-Alicante Diocese to house municipal offices. The actual document from the civil engineer, which is supposed to explain why the waste material was acquired, was missing from the file provided to the opposition. It was indeed prepared, but it was not included in the public documentation for the plenary session voted on by the members of the Corporation. Despite this omission, the allocation of funds was validated by the municipal auditor.
A technical report has revealed that Torrevieja’s current waste service design failed to anticipate the massive discrepancy between its registered population of 110,000 residents and its actual equivalent population, which swells to 443,045 people during peak periods. This seasonal influx means that, for much of the year, the local container infrastructure is forced to serve a city four times its official size.
The report, which could not be debated in the plenary session, notes that the specifications drafted by an external company called Mediurb completely missed the fact that Torrevieja is a major tourist city. Mayor Eduardo Dolón had originally commissioned the external firm to handle the contract design, claiming at the time that municipal technicians lacked the necessary technical capacity to manage the project themselves.
A technical report has revealed that Torrevieja’s horizontal city layout and high percentage of single-family homes were completely overlooked when the municipal waste contract was drawn up. Unlike compact urban models, Torrevieja features extensive low-density housing developments, resulting in a sprawling urban area that demands a much more expansive waste collection service.
To guarantee that citizens could easily access waste disposal points from their homes, it became imperative to increase the overall number of collection points across the municipality, regardless of how quickly the containers were actually being filled. According to the report, this crucial geographical factor was another detail that Mediurb, the external company that drafted the tender specifications for the city and area back in 2019, was entirely unaware of.
The People’s Party’s comfortable majority has once again secured the approval of the two Vox councillors, facing opposition from the main PSOE group and the abstention of Pablo Samper, spokesperson for Sueña Torrevieja. PSOE councillor David Villanueva pointed out that to cover an unforeseen cost of this magnitude, a contract should have been awarded to give all companies in the sector a chance to bid, instead of directly awarding the contract to the winning bidder. He questioned the city’s lack of foresight in this regard. The payment of the invoice, which predates Actúa (Grupo Hozono) taking over the service, is being financed by reducing part of the budget the City Council had allocated this year for the construction of the Punta de la Víbora park in Las Torretas, among other projects.
On the other hand, the council, again with the PP’s absolute majority, approved foregoing three million euro in funding earmarked for expanding the classroom building at the IES Libertas high school to increase the Vocational Training offerings. The Councillor for Education, Ricardo Recuero, was tasked with navigating this difficult situation. He ultimately justified the measure by explaining that the Generalitat plans to build an integrated Vocational Training centre in Torrevieja, for which there is no preliminary design, no budget, and no formally received land from the urban development sector, and therefore no transfer of said land to the Generalitat – the second phase of the La Hoya urbanisation project, where this land is located, remains stalled to this day. The councillor emphasised that it was a technical, not a political, measure.
The City Council’s decision to decline the Edificant programme’s authority to process the expansion is indeed a technical one. There is no money for what is not a priority in Torrevieja, and the plot of land where the IES Libertas school stands—a school that was originally built on a much smaller area than required—is a legacy of its poor construction in the early 2000s. The land is not large enough to accommodate any further building, and the municipality urgently needs to address other needs: the priority is to secure as many secondary school classrooms as possible, and as soon as possible.
The People’s Party (PP) feared a heated plenary session on education issues, given the presence of teachers who had already confronted the mayor and the councillor for education outside the City Hall a few days prior. The PP had been very active throughout the morning, disseminating a series of press releases highlighting supposed progress in educational management. According to Councillor Recuero, the fact that the Torrevieja City Council had lost three million euro was a step forward in establishing an integrated vocational training centre. He also presented as positive the awarding of the contract for the rehabilitation project of the Las Lagunas Secondary School (IES Las Lagunas) – the project itself, not the construction, although the press release was ambiguous in clarifying this – and the fact that the municipality now has a plot of land to locate the branch of the Mare Nostrum Secondary School, which will be the city’s seventh public secondary school, to be built using prefabricated classrooms.
The mayor’s advisors, loyal supporters of the People’s Party, nearly filled the council chamber. They whiled away the afternoon like in the old days. It wasn’t necessary.
Although the debate occasionally becomes heated and harsh, with the PSOE and Sueña Torrevieja groups offering more forceful criticism of the PP’s administration, Torrevieja’s plenary sessions are generally comfortable for the vast majority of Eduardo Dolón’s governing team. This is a far cry from the sessions that characterised Dolón’s first term, when the presence of the Local Police and performances by various groups were commonplace. This Monday, for example, the opposition refused to question the governing board’s agenda items because the session was dragging on.
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