The winner of the lifeguard service is studying initiating legal actions against the Consortium for having filed the contest

"The citizens of the island are paying for emergency services that they do not have"

The winner of the lifeguard service is studying initiating legal actions against the Consortium for having filed the contest

October 31 2010 (17:53 WET)
The island's citizens are paying for emergency services they don't have
The island's citizens are paying for emergency services they don't have

"Something is wrong when this award is not carried out." The speaker is Óscar Camps, general director of the company Proactiva Servicios Acuáticos S.L., which won the tender for the surveillance, rescue and assistance service on the beaches of Lanzarote, which had a budget of 2.4 million euros. This contest, despite being done urgently, was not awarded because it was "archived", according to the Lanzarote Emergency Consortium. The winning company is outraged and also criticizes the island's emergency services, which it describes as "precarious". For all this, it is studying taking legal action against the Consortium.

This Catalan company submitted to the tender that was called to monitor the island's beaches on June 29. They were given eight days to carry out the project. By mid-July, all the envelopes of the offers had been opened and on the 16th of that month, the Contracting Table proposed this company as the winner, "for having obtained the highest score in each lot". Then they assured him that they were going to give him "the provisional award", but they were "stalling" for months until, finally, on October 22, he learned through La Voz de Lanzarote that the contest had been "archived" due to "economic problems". Three days later, on the 25th, the company received a formal notification from the Consortium.

At no time did the Consortium communicate "anything" to them. "They told us that everything was going forward. I asked if there was any problem, but they told me that nothing was happening", he says. The company even sent allegations to find out what was happening, but these were not answered.

Óscar Camps cannot understand "how a contest can be published urgently without having a budget tied down", and therefore he is not convinced by the Consortium's explanations. "What I don't consider responsible is that an urgent contest is organized and it is not foreseen that you can lose half of the budget in two months, taking into account that August was in between, which is an inactive month", he criticizes.

"The most advantageous"

The Contracting Table itself proposed on July 16 "to award all the lots" to Proactiva Servicios Náuticos "for having obtained the highest score in each lot". "We were the most advantageous company both economically and technically, and despite this, the service is still being done by the most expensive and the technically least advantageous." Because, he assures, "the citizens of the island are paying for services they don't have" and that are being offered by NGOs.

While Óscar Camps thought, because he had been assured, that his company was going to obtain the provisional award, he sent a team from Proactiva Servicios Náuticos to start working on the island. "We interviewed 50 lifeguards, prepared everything, created a Proactiva delegation on the island, looked for premises and legal advice. We started to move because we were going to be given the provisional award", he says.

A "precarious" situation

And, at this point, he describes the island's emergencies as "precarious", after having prepared this field study. "There were lifeguards who came to the job interviews who were supposedly unemployed, but who were actually working but without a contract", he says. "If they don't have a contract, they don't have social security and they sign as volunteers when they work 8 or 9 hours a day. Where does the money go?", he asks, while defending that "there must be professionals, because it is a profession that involves lives".

However, he maintains that the island's NGOs "use cheap labor, because a person who works six days a week on a beach is not a volunteer". "It is an injustice for those who are working in the sector", he denounces.

Lifeguards "without a title"

When he interviewed the lifeguards, he says he realized that "some didn't even have the title and were working". "There are 20-hour swimming pool diplomas that you don't even know what they are. They are very strange things", he indicates.

And the general director of the company even assures that on La Cantería beach, in Haría, during one day "there was no lifeguard in the middle of August". "We had to get an English bather out of the rocks", this businessman denounces.

Óscar Camps assures that with the cancellation of the contest, the island has lost a wide deployment in terms of security. "We were going to hire all the staff and we committed to it being from the island. We wanted to train all the staff, create a lifeguard and rescue school on the island. We were going to set up a coordination center in Arrecife and, in addition, the technical project included the existence of defibrillators, as well as five boats that would comb the coasts of the island, among other improvements. Because there was also going to be an active team 24 hours a day for any emergency that arose", he highlights indignantly.

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