Overcrowding crisis looms as no bids are received for access control to popular coves
The tender to regulate access to Granadella and Portitxol remains void, while this past weekend there has already been a flood of vehicles, many of them badly parked.
With the sudden rise of temperatures, summer has arrived early and it appears that the local council has been ill-prepared. For years, the popular coves of La Barraca and La Granadella suffered terrible overcrowding which endangered both visitors and residents as roads became blocked with traffic and circulation was made very difficult by poorly-parked vehicles. But recently, access has been controlled to these areas during the summer season to avoid saturation, control barriers placed across the entrances to these two zones which were closed when they reached capacity.
However, it seems that the access control contract has suffered from same lack of interest as the running of the shuttle buses (which failed to attract a proposal last summer and the council hasn’t even bothered this year) after local media reported that no bids have been received to provide the manpower to operate the barriers that would normally be closed when the coves reach capacity, amongst other responsibilities. And this leaves the local council in a bit of a dilemma as the summer season fast approaches.
It appears that the local council’s delay in opening the tender submission period for the one-year contract (worth just over 103,000 euros with an option to extend for another year) is to blame for the lack of bids. The submission period closed on Monday 2nd June and, with all the numerous procedures to be completed once the contract was awarded including the 15 business day appeal process, the winning company would not have been able to begin operations until the end of July, probably too late to have made the contract financially viable.
Thus, it seems that potential bidders took these factors into account and, when the envelopes were opened on Friday 6th June, there were no proposals to consider, forcing the contracting committee to formally announce “the lack of bidders in the contracting process for the provision of security surveillance and auxiliary services on the beaches”.
Which leaves Xàbia facing the potential of a return to the saturation and chaos in the coves of La Barraca and La Granadella. Indeed the past few weekends have already sounded alarms; both coves were extremely overcrowded and the roads were clogged with illegally parked vehicles, forcing the already over-stretched local police force to attend and issue fines. And it seems that those officers might have to be present in the coves for the remainder of the summer at a time when the municipality more than triples its population and the security forces are needed more than ever across our town, not only in these popular zones.
The local socialist opposition PSOE has been quick off the mark to issue a series of statements in which they claim that they had long been warning that this situation would happen. They accused the local government of sitting on a massive backlog, warning of a serious safety issue without regulated access to the coves, especially if illegally parked cars make it difficult for emergency vehicles to attend to incidents such as a fire or an injured person.
The socialist statement also highlighted the fact that the marking off of beach bathing areas had not yet been carried out, an omission which could jeopardize the blue flag status of the beach at La Granadella. The contract procedure had already been activated by emergency procedure and three companies have presented their bids. However, the technical specifications did not mention the installation of anchorage buoys which means that vessels will not have anything to tie to and may be forced to drop anchor directly onto the protected underwater Posidonia sea grass meadows.
Although it doesn’t currently have representation on the local council, the local branch of the left-wing Podem also released a statement in which it insisted that it was time for a comprehensive and permanent solution to the problem and pledged that if it would establish a municipal fleet of minibuses to take bathers to the beaches during the summer which would also connect the three urban centres and residential areas during the winter to provide a more efficient service than the current one: “a beneficial solution for residents and visitors, and without unpleasant surprises every summer.”
