'Half-baked botch jobs'
Orihuela Socialists criticise jobs left unfinished or not started on coast
DELAYS to ongoing works and promised new infrastructure in Orihuela Costa have been criticised by the opposition Socialist party (PSOE).
This week their councillors flagged up unfinished work on streets in La Regia and the lack of any progress on the promised skate park.
María García said the contract to replace pavements in La Regia and La Zenia was awarded in November 2020 but work did not start until eight months later, in the middle of summer.
Moreover, both jobs were ‘scheduled to take four months but now more than seven have passed and they are still not finished’, she assured.
“Not only are there still materials piled up in one area, but many elements that were there have not been replaced, for example benches that were on the pavement, and trees that were transplanted to a few metres away,” explained Sra García.
“The most worrying thing for residents is the wall which ran along the pavement to provide safety from the adjacent ravine has not been replaced.”
She said residents are complaining about ‘the lack of information and above all the lack of haste to resolve basic matters’.
“They have the feeling that everything is being half done without thinking about them or their needs, and at the same time offering a terrible image to tourists who come and see everything unfinished,” according to Sra García.
She also highlighted longstanding and numerous deficiencies with the park in Aguamarina, which infrastructure councillor Ángel Noguera was supposedly going to complain to the construction company about.
“Now this is being worked on but we don’t know until when, and the broken table tennis tables have disappeared but were not replaced,” she said.
Sra García accused Sr Noguera of overseeing ‘one botch-job after another, patching the Costa with half-baked solutions and selling them in the press and on social media as genuine achievements, but they are really disappointing announcements for residents of the coast, who far from getting improvements end up having more problems.”
Skate parks late
Meanwhile, PSOE councillor Patricia Menárguez asked when the skate parks promised by the council for Orihuela city and Costa would be built.
She blamed the sports department and its councillor, Víctor Bernabéu. The skate parks were electoral promises of the Partido Popular (PP) and Ciudadanos coalition council, but only one has been built, in the rural district of La Aparecida.
Sr Bernabéu was quoted by various media as saying the tender process for the city and coast skate parks would be started when the one in La Aparecida was inaugurated.
However, 10 months have passed since then and the PSOE learned from the council contracts department these jobs have not been awarded yet.
Sra Menárguez also questioned why the skate park planned for Orihuela Costa is smaller than all the others, at only 220 square metres, compared to 236m2 in La Aparecida and 493m2 in the city.
She asked why the decision was ‘clearly not based on population criteria’, since the coast has 10 times more registered-residents than the rural district and two thirds as many as the city.
Sra Menárguez accused the council of not caring about Orihuela Costa residents, since the area not only ‘lacks investments’, but ‘when they come they are late and insufficient’.