Thursday, April 6, 2023, 10:16 p.m.
It was already intuited from how they voted in plenary sessions that the current government team was not in favor of the task of taking ownership of the headquarters of the extinct CAM. But last Monday that lack of interest became official. The City Council handed over to the Fundación Mediterráneo (the heir to the CAM’s social work) the keys to the building which, since work began on the Palacio Marqués de Arneva, has provided a housing solution for a large part of the municipal services. In the absence of making the accounts of the last supplies, the lease that was formalized in July 2019 can already be considered extinguished without making the purchase option that it contemplated effective.
The City Council thus resumes normality in the location of its services. The old bank headquarters on Calle Loaces even hosted plenary sessions in its auditorium, including the one for the motion of censure. Its floors, originally intended to be a civic and cultural center, had to be transformed into offices. Among other areas, Human Resources, the protocol service, the press office and even the mayor’s office itself have passed through there, now back at the Consistory headquarters.
Last week the City Council began to convene its press conferences in a room attached to the new tourist office instead of in the improvised room that was set up to attend the media in the dressing rooms of the CAM auditorium.
In this way, the Marqués de Arneva Palace comes to fulfill an almost exclusively institutional function as the seat of the Plenary Session and the mayor’s office, as well as Tourism and Human Resources. The rest of the councils scattered throughout the urban area continue in the places where they had been working.
In the old headquarters of the CAM, only Banco Sabadell now remains, which owns part of the ground floor and the first floor, which they use as a bank branch. Since Monday no neighbors.
The previous government team, at the initiative of the PP, already tried twice without success to obtain the support of the Plenary to acquire the property for which the Foundation requested 2.7 million and the municipal technicians valued at 2.5. Then the opposition of Ciudadanos – then a government partner – avoided it.
The City Council, which had already been paying to use the building for cultural events, after starting the work in Marqués de Arneva, managed to have the property transferred until December 31, 2021 free of charge as long as its purchase was managed. Upon expiration of that term and not having taken over the property, a lease of 15,796 euros per month was set, which has been in force until now.
The PP continues to defend the usefulness of the building and argues that, with the works in the Archaeological Museum, the loss of use of this property and the transfer of the Sorzano Palace to the Pedrera Foundation, only La Lonja remains as the only auditorium and exhibition hall.
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