On Tuesday, the Madrid City Council gave the green light for its Municipal Transport Company (EMT) to directly manage a recently renovated car park in the west of Madrid. The car park, located above the Vicálvaro metro station, will have 144 spaces for residents and also for rotation, thanks to its location adjacent to this transport hub. So far, the City Council has spent 2.7 million euros to renovate the facilities built more than ten years ago by the Community of Madrid, through a collaboration agreement through which several infrastructures were created near the metro and later transferred to the City Council.
The municipal accounts of this car park are in deficit: there will be losses of 1.5 million euros over the next 20 years, according to the economic studies to which Somos Madrid has had access. If the vote in the plenary session this Tuesday is in favour – which is almost certain thanks to the absolute majority of the PP – the municipal company will assume these losses in exchange for providing these facilities to the residents of the neighbourhood and to the users of the metro.
The municipal policy in this case is diametrically opposed to that followed by José Luis Martínez-Almeida’s team in the municipal car parks that generate profits and are located, for the most part, in the centre of Madrid. In these cases, the Mobility sector has already launched several calls for tenders to privatise the facilities and ask companies other than the EMT to make the facilities profitable in exchange for work in compensation or a more or less significant fee.
This is what has just happened, for example, in the Velázquez, Luna and Santa Ana car parks, which have been put out to tender in recent months for a private company to take charge of their rehabilitation in exchange for their operation for the next few decades. The opposition has asked that the City Council in these cases follow the example of what happened in Plaza de España: remunicipalise these facilities so that the profits go to the EMT and it can assume the losses caused by other public car parks on the outskirts.
According to the calculations of the Madrid City Council itself, the ten municipal car parks privatised by Almeida during his term as mayor will generate a profit of 272.2 million euros during their entire period of operation, according to the feasibility studies carried out prior to their privatisation. The most profitable will be the two that Real Madrid will operate next to the Bernabéu, with hundreds of millions in profits over the next 40 years (the feasibility study initially estimated 120 million), thanks to a competition tailor-made for meringues and that only the white club has appeared.
The second most profitable will be the three located under Velázquez Street (Juan Bravo, Ayala and Jorge Juan), with almost 85.6 million in expected profits according to the feasibility study published before the municipal competition. Finally, the business plan approved by the winning company in the competition was raised well above this figure, thanks to which the fee that the City Council will collect for it has increased considerably.
In addition to those already mentioned, during his five years at the helm of Cibeles, Almeida launched a tender for the operation of the Luna-Tudescos car parks (15.8 million expected profits), Santa Ana (23.5 million), Carmen (18.3 million), Santo Domingo (1.8) and Cortés (6.6). “This is one more example that the PP only seeks, with this concession system, to transfer the profits to its related companies and socialize the losses,” they denounce from Más Madrid, a very critical party.
EMT needs funds to undertake work
More Madrid has denounced in recent months that the policy of privatizing the most profitable parking lots in Madrid instead of municipalizing them to provide more resources to the EMT is mortgaging the future of the company. An example occurred this summer, when the company approved the request for a loan of just over 12 million euros to renovate the Sanchinarro garages and almost another million to update the on-board technology.
In concrete terms, requesting this credit instead of covering the expense with your own resources will result in an additional expense of four million euros, due to the payment of interest at a rate of 4.5% per year for the next 15 years.
The privatization of the parking lots does not benefit the EMT, but it does benefit the coffers of the Mobility Zone, which has designed a system to immediately pay half of the fee requested from the concessionaires, subtracting resources from the government teams that will arrive in the coming months. mandates. If we only count the last three concessions executed, the municipality will earn 54.4 million thanks to the advance on the fee that the concessionaires have offered to pay for the operation of the parking lots that it has put out to tender in Santa Ana, Luna-Tudescos. and Velázquez.
Very different figures from those of the Vicálvaro EMT car park, now approved for municipal management. The losses will be used to finance 144 parking spaces (130 for cars and the rest for motorcycles), with a first floor (-1) dedicated to rotating users and temporary subscribers, and a second where residents will park. “In this specific case of Vicálvaro, the needs of the neighborhood are not even taken into account,” says José Luis Nieto, councilor of Más Madrid. “They decided that the car park would only have 25 spaces for residents, not because they carried out a rigorous study, but rather because of the simple comparison with other car parks of private companies that are not in consolidated areas.”
“Since he has been mayor, Almeida has dedicated himself to the privatisation of a long list of car parks. And they all have in common that they are very profitable. On the other hand, the one in Artilleros, which is loss-making, supports him unscrupulously at the EMT”, says the opposition councillor, who points out that the privatised car parks could generate 13.5 million euros in profits each year for the City Council: “It has been proven that public management is much more beneficial than private management: all this money could be reinvested in policies that improve sustainable mobility, in more drivers for the EMT, to compensate for poor parking…” he suggests.
