No company wants to take charge city maintenance Son Banya is a drug trafficker and, faced with this situation, the Palma City Council has been forced, for the second time in a year, to cancel the tender for the “corrective maintenance” of the municipal shelter officially known as the Son Riera municipal shelter.
The 100,000 euros offered by Palma City Hall were not enough to any company in the sector to take charge of solving, for example, the daily blockages that occur in the pipes of the shanty town, the repair and correction of the stability conditions of the shelters, the safety of precarious constructions, etc.
Just a year ago, two companies presented officially and on time their offers to this effect, even if, when things went wrong, none of them chose to go ahead.
After this first failure, the City Hall launched a new call for tenders last June, this service of maintenance and care of streets and unsanitary housing on municipal land and, on this occasion, no bidder submitted to the call.
Therefore, the maintenance of the most marginal area of Palma remains pending, and from now on it will be the municipal brigades who will be in charge at specific times of dealing with the deficiencies and unforeseen events that arise, if they are called that. .demand.
Created by the Palma City Council in 1970 as an experiment and for the first time in Spain, the half a thousand people who survive in poverty in the drug town of Son Banya do so in a few cconditions inconceivable in a modern society with a brutal lack of hygiene, surrounded by garbage, rats, with serious health and schooling problems for the minors who live there.
Although in January 2018 the municipal plenary session unanimously approved a political agreement for its dismantling and the relocation of vulnerable families that ended in 2023, little or no progress has been made in these years.
Since then, 203 people have left the city, including 118 adults and 85 minors, for a total of 48 families.
The main obstacle to completing its dismantling is the lack of available housing to relocate vulnerable families, despite the fact that In spring 2023, Palma City Council and the Balearic Housing Institute (Ibavi) reached an agreement to transfer social housing to other areas of the Balearic capital for this purpose. But in practice, nothing has been done since then, beyond promises and official announcements.
The last municipal action in the area took place last July, when the National Police and the Local Police of Palma cordoned off the area so that workers could demolish a one and a half meter high wall, made of scrap metal and garbage, which conditioned the passage and visibility of people in the shantytown to the police.
A fortification built after a fight between clans that made it difficult for police authorities to enter, the demolition of which ended with the demolition of five illegal buildings.
After the last legislature, the previous municipal government with the pro-independence councilor New Truyol As head of the Urban Planning and Housing sector, he will sit back and watch the dismantling of this drug city, now in opposition, Truyol demands that the PP mayor, Jaime Martinezto fix the mess in Son Banya.
Truyol this week disgraced the first mayor by stating that “despite promises, no new housing transfers have materialized, worsening the situation of dozens of families,” demanding that the current first mayor put in place the resources necessary to put an end to Son Banya. “The citizens of Palma deserve a government that acts and not a government that, according to them, is delaying the solution of problems that have lasted too long.”
