The Buenavista del Norte City Council has lost more than half a million euros in a grant intended to finish the Casa de Los Mayores, where people from the municipality stay, as well as from other towns in the region and on the Island.
The Consistory -Sí se puede y CC- returned 468,047 euros on March 3, 2023 “and late-payment interest is still to be paid, which is estimated at more than 50,000 euros, taking into account the amount of the subsidy and the interest rate of applicable delay, which will have to be assumed with municipal financing ”, denounce the Socialists.
A return that, in his opinion, “represents a significant loss for the Center for the Elderly and the coffers of Buenavista, one of the municipalities with the smallest population in Tenerife.”
As exposed by the PSOE, the municipal Corporation received in October 2019 the subsidy to execute a project whose duration had been estimated between four and six months, but the government team requested up to five extensions over four years. At the fifth request, the Insular Institute of Social and Socio-Health Care (IASS) rejected the new modification of the term, because “the works have not begun nor the bidding procedure for the same for a project foreseen in six months by the City Council itself, ” argued the IASS after denying it, in April 2022. “The other municipalities and beneficiary entities of the same call have already executed the projects,” added the IASS at the time.
In 2018, the Buenavista City Council, led at that time by the PSOE, requested a grant from the IASS that amounted to 510,955 euros to adapt the basement of the building. After the 2019 municipal elections, when Sí se puede and CC became Mayor, the IASS granted the subsidy on October 30, 2019, with the execution period being four months, until February 29, 2020, which did not arrive. to be fulfilled
The version of the mayor, Antonio González Fortes, is very different “and has been explained over and over again,” he stresses. He assures that the IASS argued that it could not grant him a new extension “for administrative reasons, which in 2021 had been able to be resolved, but not at that time.” Due to this, the Minister of Social Action, Marián Franquet, “told him to return the aforementioned amount, but that he promised to grant it again, as was done with other municipalities.”
Fortes assures that in November of last year he contacted her again to discuss the payment of interest and told her that “they were going to try to ensure that the City Council did not have to pay them.”
However, he verified that in the 2023 Budgets of the Cabildo de Tenerife “the item to re-dispose of that money and award the work was not awarded.” And this was confirmed by the counselor, who told him that “it could be enabled through an amendment from the Sí Podemos Canarias group in the Cabildo that, when presented, was rejected by the PSOE.”
“The procedure says that when repaying a subsidy, you have to do it with interest,” says the president, who qualifies that “the City Council has not lost a subsidy but rather the Cabildo has taken it away, just like the commitment to return to include it”.
To this we must add that this last administration was “practically a year” to inform of the modification of the project and in the middle of the adjudication contest the Consistory resolved an appeal filed by the College of Architects; therefore, he insists, “the delay was not due to causes attributable to the action of the municipal government.”
