Base rates of up to 30,000 euros drown the concerted: “Not everything in school is a dining room”

The known as garbage rate will mean the «Economic Puntilla» For many concerted centers throughout Spain. This indicates to ABC Luis Centeno, at the head of Catholic schools, which brings together the religious concerted schools throughout the country. From the Spanish Confederation of Teaching Centers (CECE), the other great organization of the concerted, they agree that this new Gravamen is “unsustainable” and “it has many worried schools.”

This tax, which in most cases will begin to be paid in 2025, varies according to the ordinance of each City Council. But its origin is not municipal, but ministerial. Specifically, state law 7/2022, on contaminated waste and soils, forced the municipalities of more than 5,000 inhabitants to launch the ordinance that will regulate it before April this year. In this context, the concerted schools are at the crossroads that, by law, they cannot impact their students the rate as a private. There is also the aggravating thing that educational concerts have been updated almost two decades.

As this newspaper has learned, the amount, in the most extreme cases, is around or exceed 30,000 euros. This is precisely the case of San José de Cluny College, in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid), Municipality that approved its ordinance in 2024 and received an invoice of 31,000 euros to pay in four payments.

From the sector of the concerted, religious or not, they point out that exceeding 1,000 euros, the accounts in the concert can be complicated in excess and, therefore, in municipalities such as Madrid, León, Valencia or Mahón (Menorca) They are proposed to challenge ordinances if an exemption is not included. The most disproportionate amounts are in the city of Madrid, where the City Council has set the stop of the garbage fee at 20,000 euros.

In April, the first invoices will be turned in the capital that, in the words of Emilio Díaz, representative of Catholic schools in this municipality, “a serious financing problem for the concerted centers ». Díaz explains that, in essence, the disproportion of the tax occurs because to calculate the rate, the total extension of the school and not only of those spaces in which waste is generated is taken into account. The surface that the dining room usually occupies is scarce if compared to that of the recess patios or the classrooms themselves.

And yet, the centers will have to pay for all spaces. «Not all square meters of a school are dining room. Schools usually have broad courtyardsthat will make the rate in Madrid centers reach the top of 20,000 euros easily. The reality is that in most spaces nor more residues are generated than one traveling in the street can produce», Says Díaz. Nor is it understood that the schools are included in the cadastral qualification of “cultural activity” or that in the ordinance there is no reduction for teaching centers.

Difficult to assume

But, outside the capital, the garbage rate also worries the concerted in other Spanish municipalities. In the ordinance of Lion, For example, that calculates the rate taking into account the meters, the top has been marked in 7,500 euros per year, that “for some schools with few lines, Ricardo Bernardo, representative of La Concertada in Castilla y León, could mean. In the city of Valencia The situation is something different but equally delicate. There, the tax is calculated taking into account water consumption. «The schools could have to assume an added expense of 5,000 eurosbecause in the ordinance no bonus is contemplated, ”says Joaquín Monzón, from the concerted of the capital of Turia. In Balearic Islands, the problem only exists in the municipality of Mahón (Menorca)where a school of a line, which does not reach the 300 students, will have to assume an annual tax of 4,800 euros.

On the other hand, being a state law that imposes a rate to numerous municipalities of the opposite sign, politicians, says Santiago García, of Cece, «The ball passes to each other, although what prevails is the collection eagerness».