Residents who live around the Padre Jesús park in San Miguel de Salinas staged a protest on Thursday to demand that the Council reopens the green area that has been closed to the public since September 2022.
The demonstration was organised by the San Miguel de Salinas Neighbourhood Association to echo “public unrest”, due to the prolonged stoppage of the park’s refurbishment works. The Neighbourhood has said that it is available as a “channel for the resolution of this dispute.”
The park is one of the few public spaces in the centre of San Miguel, the largest park in area, comprising of more than 2,200 square metres, similar in size to the Plazas de la Libertad and Jaime I.
According to the neighbourhood group, the municipal plenary session on December 18, 2020 agreed to upgrade the park, awarding a contract on July 7, 2022; but only for the first phase of the works costing 128,000 euros with a completion period of two months. Works got underway in September of that year.
A year later, on July 25, 2023, a new contract was awarded for the purchase and installation of the park’s play equipment and furniture, for an amount of 236,733 euros and “a completion period of three months, of which two have now passed.”
The residents accuse the San Miguel municipal council of “laziness and negligence,” stating that the municipality has now spent almost three years remodelling a park and depriving residents, especially the children, of it’s use, for far too long.
Padre Jesús Park is located just a few metres from the Gloria Fuertes Infant and Primary School and is situated in one of the most densely populated areas of the municipality. Many residents of the area attended the protest, including a large group of children, together with representatives of IU de San Miguel.
In a video that he made following the call for the protest, and that was published on social networks, Mayor Juan de Dios Fresneda (PSOE) explained that a contract for the second phase of the works has been awarded, and that the action will restart in “4 or 5 weeks.”
The mayor apologised to the residents for the delay, stating that “We did not have staff who could put together the new tender document at that time.”
He also stated that the municipal election period and the August holiday period delayed hiring, but the council will now try to partially reopen part of the green area just as soon as the work is carried out by the contractor.
DEBRIS FROM THE PARK
The neighbourhood association has also denounced that, fourteen months after starting the works, the debris from the park remains dumped on the outskirts of the municipality instead of being taken to an authorised landfill site, as stated in the contract specifications.
They also state that, in addition to the “contamination of the soil and defacement of the landscape, an illegal landfill has been established by the municipal council”. They are extremely unhappy that that the council, “instead of combating illegal landfills, is generating them and they ask for the immediate removal and subsequent recycling of the rubble from the works.”
