The Official Association of Architects of Madrid (COAM) considers that the award criteria for the City of Justice project sponsored by the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso violate the law on public sector contracts and the architecture quality lawapproved in June by the Senate, and for this reason it has registered a special appeal before the Administrative Court of Public Procurement, which EL PAÍS agreed to.
The conflict, which this body must resolve before mid-September, once again puts one of the most controversial plans of the current PP executive under the spotlight. The successful bidder will contribute 500 million for the construction of the complex, which will bring together all the judicial bodies of the region. In exchange, it will operate it for 36 years, in which an annual canon of public money will enter (exceeding 2,100 million in total) to which other income from rentals or parking charges (268 million) will be added. The Community calculates that the income of the chosen company can exceed 2,800 millionbecause the foreseeable thing is that there will be modifications of the agreement during the four decades that it will be in force.
“The law approved in June establishes that the quality of architecture is a good of general interest that must be present in any competition called by the Administration. And what we are seeing is that the Administration is following previous criteria”, defends Pablo Olalquiaga, who is a doctor of architecture and vice-dean of COAM. “The award criteria for this competition, with its scales, at no time mention the quality of the architecture, nor is a score attributed to it,” adds this representative of the professionals, who also demand an open public competition for preliminary projects for the drafting of the Basic Project, Execution and Construction Management of each building, prior to the bidding of the works themselves.
“We defend that the only way to guarantee quality is to call the competition independently, with a competition of pure and simple ideas, which defines the architecture, and another of works”, continues Olalquiaga. “A building in which justice is dispensed is sensitive in terms of the quality of architecture, like a hospital, where people suffer and suffer. You can’t frivolize and not take that into account,” he adds. And he regrets: “In addition, and although it is not the subject of the appeal, the Administration [regional] it renounces the time and public resources invested in the past, because it goes backwards and does not have everything that has been done up to now”.
It is a reminder that the City of Justice project has been in the eye of the hurricane for 20 years. For a time, he was the right eye of the Esperanza Aguirre government, which advanced in tenders, expenses and projects. Her successor in power, Ignacio González, landed the plan: 30-year concession, at a cost of 1,752.5 million euros (1,448.4 million plus 304.1 million for VAT). Upon coming to power, Cristina Cifuentes stopped everything and took the matter to the prosecution. In the middle, a torrent of expenses that has ended up in court.
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Thus, when the Chamber of Accounts investigated the balance sheets of the public company Campus de la Justicia between 2005 and 2015, it concluded that the figures did not add up.
Only in expenses without contractual support there were 4.8 million euros, to which were added improper expenses of a company dependent on the Public Administration. The project was presented 72 times, and included paid trips to New York or Singapore. The act of laying the first stone cost more than a million. The vast majority of employees earned 100,000 euros per year. And in the end, at least 110 million were spent so that the plan to unite all the judicial offices in the region was never completed. Only two things remain of that project today: the donut from the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, now in the vicinity of the Isabel Zendal nursing hospital; and a judicial investigation still open in which charges from the Aguirre era are under scrutiny, such as former counselor and former vice president Alfredo Prada, for whom anti-corruption requested eight years in prison in January 2021.
In fact, as this newspaper advanced, the government of Díaz Ayuso considered all those previous works useless, which has made it a waste to have paid millions of euros just for the models and plans of some of the buildings, no matter how much they signed them. some of the most famous architects in the world, such as Norman Foster. Does that mean that quality has been renounced in the work to make it cheaper?
“We have always said that we are going to make a functional, executive project, and without great fuss, but absolutely worthy and of course within all the quality control standards in accordance with current legislation,” explains a government spokesman. “No cent of a euro is spared there,” he stresses. And on other aspects of COAM’s appeal, he specifies: “It is the Administration that must assess, within the different contract models allowed by the public sector contract law, the one that best suits the interests. And tendering the drafting of the basic and execution projects together with the construction management represents a very important saving in time”.
The goal is for the new infrastructure, which would concentrate all the judicial offices in the region and serve 30,000 people a day, to be ready in 2027.
If the court agrees with the Community of Madrid, the deadline for submitting bids to build and operate the City of Justice will end on October 20. Of the 100 points at stake to decide the winner, 35 will be decided based on the reduction proposed by the interested parties on the 2,800 million that the Administration calculates that the project will end up costing. The use of renewable energies will also influence, or technical projects for cleaning, monitoring and maintenance of buildings and facilities, which will also be borne by the successful bidder. The quality of the buildings, as COAM denounces, will not influence anything.
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