Earlier this month, the President of the Valencia Region, Ximo Puig from the PSOE, proposed a reduction in Christmas lights of 20 percent, both to reduce the costs to municipalities during a financial crisis, but equally importantly to reduce the amount of energy consumed amid the current campaign to reduce the reliance on energy brought on by the impact of the war in Ukraine.
However, neither of those messages appeared to have reached Torrevieja, where the plan of the Partido Popular (PP) government appears to be to increase Christmas lights this year, and subsequently increase the amount of money spent on them.
According to Pablo Samper, spokesperson for Sueña Torrevieja, an opposition political group, the tender, which was published this week, “amounts to €360,969.20, which represents an increase of €158,737, almost 80% over the previous year, which amounted to €202,239.
This increase is divided into two sections: an increase in unit prices of around 13%, and an increase in lighting units of around 60%, which, according to Samper, “will cause an additional increase in energy expenditure by not complying with the regulations to reduce energy costs with the consequent increase in public lighting consumption over the previous year of 60%, which will mean more than tripling the public lighting bill for 42 days”.
This increase is out of the question, they say, even more so with the reduction in income due to the reduction from the capital gains tax, of which only a total of 1.66 million euro have been collected in the first six months of 2022, of the 22.24 million budgeted for the whole year, while Samper assures “at the same time the mayor and the councillor for the Treasury are begging the Ministry to adhere to the study commission of the Capital Gains Tax for the municipalities”.
“Sueña Torrevieja defend our patron saint festivities and traditions, and we want lighting for these dates, for this reason we believe that with what was invested last year is already more than enough and we do not understand this brutal increase in a situation of world energy crisis, with families struggling to make ends meet and fill the shopping cart.”
Torrevieja council is increasingly being criticised for wasting public money, such as has been the case in the concerts held in the town over summer, at a huge cost to the public purse, but without seeing any return.
