The mayor of Tinajo, Jesús Machín, has acknowledged that there are “errors” in the specifications of the tender to award the garbage collection service of the municipality and has decided to withdraw it, after a company filed an appeal with the Administrative Court of Public Contracts of the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands.
“If there are errors, the most important thing is to recognize it”, said the mayor, who then pointed to the secretary as responsible. “According to what he explained to me, there is an error in the specifications and the man recognizes it. Just as other times I have boasted about the secretary, now the man has made a mistake”, said Machín.
What the mayor has not specified is what these errors consist of, although he has denied that they are related to what the opposition had already denounced, which accused him of breaking the law by publishing these specifications by decree and before taking them to the Plenary. “The challenge is not because of the plenary. It is because of a series of things that I don't remember now. Maybe he has skipped a rule, a law or something”, he pointed out.
However, although he has assured that they are “things that have nothing to do with the Plenary”, he later added that it “may be one of the things of the Plenary”. “I don't know”, he concluded. In this regard, he pointed out that when he finally took those specifications to the plenary, after having already published them, he could not approve them by an absolute majority because a councilor from his government group was missing, who “was sick”. “One of the things I interpret is that a simple majority is not the same as an absolute majority”, added the mayor.
“If there are errors, it is corrected. And we will do it as quickly as possible”, he defended, admitting that this will mean starting the process from the beginning. In fact, he has announced that this time he will hire an external company to prepare the new specifications, and has pointed out that he has already contacted the same one that made those of the municipalities of Tías and Yaiza. However, depending on the amount of the contract, they may have to call a new tender for that award beforehand.
Meanwhile, the service has been running for more than a year with the contract expired and the last extension signed with the current concessionaire ends next Saturday. “We will have to find a solution, with the legally correct way to extend that”, Machín pointed out in this regard. That extension would have had to be signed even if the tender continued -given that it would have taken months to resolve-, but the mayor has stated that until this Tuesday he had not yet spoken with the current company nor had they defined how to do it.
Regarding which route they will use, he has pointed to the possibility of returning to the “emergency situation”, as he did when signing a new contract during the state of alarm. “I don't remember how many there are right now”, he replied when asked about the extensions that have already been signed with this company, about which the opposition has been making warnings for more than a year, due to breaches in the provision of the service.
“If the desire of other people is that garbage is not collected in Tinajo, they will not achieve it. I will do everything possible and impossible to ensure that garbage continues to be collected in Tinajo”, Machín defended, while the opposition reproaches him for not calling this tender before the previous contract expired, and that he ended up doing it more than a year later and failing to comply with legal procedures.
Regarding the delay that having to start the entire process again will entail, the mayor has stated that “all the work that has been done will be used and what is wrong will be corrected”, although this time the specifications will not be made with municipal personnel, but with an external company. “I have done it with the intention of saving the City Council money and we have achieved it with everything except this”, he alleged, also pointing to the Contracting department for what happened.
