The Santander City Council will lose 2.48 million euros of the European funds it received for the renovation of the El Sardinero car park as a deterrent parking space by reforming the project that eliminated the 800 spaces that were initially to be built underground. The loss of European aid has already been notified by the Ministry of Transport (MITMA), but the City Council has hidden this fact.
The ministerial resolution, interlocutor of governments and municipalities in the management of the NextGenerationEU Funds, is pending to be definitive since the City Council can take advantage of the provisional resolution taken, but as of today it has the financing more than committed and it is very likely that it will lose it, unless it recovers the initial project and digs into the basements planned then. Consulted by elDiario.es, the City Council has not given any answer to the questions asked about the European aid granted for this action.
The park and ride is part of the plan “Promotion of active mobility, promotion of modal change and digital and sustainable transformation of urban transport in Santander”, for which Santander has received an amount of 7,801,875 euros in European funds.
Of this total, 2.4 million were to finance the more than four million that would cost to renovate the current car park and leave it practically as it is, even with fewer spaces than the current one. However, the aid was actually granted to the initial project, which planned to allow 800 additional spaces to those currently existing on the surface, reaching a total of 1,340 spaces. For this, Europe contributed 36% of the cost.
“The Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility has rejected the request of the Santander City Council to finance with the European NextGenerationEU funds the renovation of the surface parking lot next to the Sardinero instead of building an underground park and ride,” Mitma informed this media. For the ministry, the cancellation of the underground parking project invalidates the condition under which the aid was granted.
“The Ministry has determined that the amendment modifies the nature and objective of the subsidized project, in addition to entailing a substantial change, so that the requirements established in the bases of the call to allow the proposed modification are not met,” he said in this statement. In this regard, he adds, rejecting that the modification of the project can be argued in an alleged increase in the cost induced by the excavation.
“European aid has been granted to carry out the project proposed by the City Council itself, which doubles the number of dissuasive spaces and presents a high degree of maturity, to promote sustainable mobility and prevent private vehicles from accessing the city centre, hence the increase in the cost of the project cannot be considered unexpected.
European aid was granted to implement the project proposed by the City Council itself, which doubles the number of dissuasive spaces and presents a high degree of maturity, to promote sustainable mobility and prevent private vehicles from accessing the city centre.
The resolution is not firm, but, unless the City Council returns to the initial idea of burying a good number of places, everything seems to indicate that it will be confirmed. The Ministry itself proposes the solution to maintain European funds: assume the additional cost of underground installations with municipal funds, or give up obtaining funding:
“Now, the city council will be able to present allegations regarding the final resolution, being able to choose between carrying out the works as planned (assuming the additional costs with its own funds), or renouncing this action and returning the aid granted of 2.48 million euros,” the ministry concluded.
Either way, the situation that has opened is complex for the Santander City Council, especially when, in 2022, it has already deposited in cash 1.6 million euros of the promised funding (it had planned to deposit the remaining 800,000 euros in January of this year). So, unless it recovers the initial project by assuming the additional cost itself, Santander will have to return 1.6 million euros to Europe.
Santander City Council is not only moving forward with its intention to build a surface park and ride, but has already launched a call for tenders and is in fact studying nine offers to carry it out from as many construction companies. It is expected that the hydraulic excavators will enter the site before the end of 2024 and that the facility will be operational in 2025.
The city council did not inform
The mayor of Santander, Gema Igual (PP), in statements to the media on September 16, did not announce that the ministry had decided to withdraw European funding. To justify the transformation of the current car park into a park and ride according to the second model, he clarified: “For this, we have European funds and we maintain them.” He thus responded, four days ago, to the criticism of the socialist opposition, which warned him that he risked losing European funding because modifying the initial project would be equivalent to “wasting public money.”
The modification of the parking project was approved by the Local Government Council in April, which the councilor for Public Works, Agustín Navarro (PP), justified by the increase in the cost of the works that would occur if the initial project continued. In the words of the councilor himself, the project was substantially modified because, “after examining the project delivered, it turned out that the cost would amount to a much higher amount than that estimated in the application for European funds for said action (8.4 million euros). At no time was it pointed out that European aid could result in a loss, as has been the case.
During the first half of last August, the Local Government Council approved the tender documents for the works, worth 4.2 million euros, publicly stating in its communication that the facility was still eligible for European funding.
