PP demands answers over Sagunto's new street lighting contract
Sagunto's PP party will take the €26.8 million, 15-year street lighting, traffic light and Smart City contract to the Finance Committee for scrutiny.
Scrutiny before signature: that is the demand the PP is making in Sagunto over a new contract to manage street lighting, the traffic light network and Smart City services, currently being prepared by the town's governing team. The opposition's own figure for the full 15-year term stands at €26.8 million, a financial commitment that, by their calculation, works out to roughly €1.8 million a year from the municipal budget.
PP councillor Sara Cañada will bring the file to the next Finance Committee meeting armed with a list of questions aimed at breaking down the spending. Among her main concerns is the exact split between investment in new equipment and routine maintenance of the existing service — a distinction she says is not clear in the documentation released so far.
This kind of upfront scrutiny is standard for long-term contracts: since the commitment outlasts a full council term, the Finance Committee acts as a non-binding preliminary step where different parties can raise technical questions before the file goes, if applicable, to a full council vote.
Specifically, the councillor is asking for figures on how many light points will be replaced, what share of the traffic light network will be renewed, and what concrete actions fall under the Smart City label — a term that in practice can cover anything from traffic sensors to remote digital management platforms.
One of the PP's central arguments is that much of the modernisation work has already been done in previous years: the town already switched conventional streetlights for LED technology and removed unnecessary traffic lights once roundabouts were built at various points. The party wants any new improvements put in context against what has already been carried out, to avoid presenting them as an entirely new transformation of the service.
Energy management contracts of this kind are typically structured as energy services company (ESCO) deals, where the contractor advances the investment in equipment and recovers the outlay over the life of the contract through a fixed fee — a model that lets councils modernise infrastructure without upfront municipal spending, but which also shifts the long-term risk that the promised savings might not materialise.
The PP's questions also target the underlying contract model. They ask whether alternatives were considered — such as the council managing the service directly, or tendering the different services separately — and what technical reports support both the 15-year term and the chosen formula over those other options. On the price tag itself, they want to know whether the €26.8 million includes VAT and how much room it leaves for price revisions or future extensions.
The party's third set of questions focuses on the promised outcomes: what energy and financial savings are expected, what method was used to calculate those projections, and what penalty scheme would apply to the winning company if it fails to meet the quality standards set out in the tender.
Penalty clauses for missed performance indicators — standard in energy services contracts — aim to shift part of the financial risk onto the contractor if the installation underperforms, though how effective they are in practice depends on the council having its own technical means to verify compliance year after year.
For Sagunto residents, the debate translates directly into the town's long-term budget: a €26.8 million contract spread over 15 years locks in a fixed budget line that, whatever the political colour of the governing team over the next three terms, will limit the room available for other public investment.
Once awarded, a contract of this size will have to appear on the Public Sector Procurement Platform, the public registry where tender documents, submitted bids and final award terms are published, which in theory would let any resident look up in future the details the opposition is asking about now. How effective that transparency turns out to be, though, will depend on the information being published fully and clearly — something that does not always happen with major municipal service contracts. Similar cases in other Spanish town halls have shown that 15-year energy contracts tend to generate more controversy the less detailed the initial information available to the opposition is — a pattern Sagunto's PP appears to want to avoid by demanding answers before, rather than after, the final signature.
Before the contract can move forward in its municipal approval process, the PP will demand full access to the file, including the financial report and the technical studies used to design it. According to El Periódico de Aquí.
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